New Zealand high court rules content-sharing site founder can be extradited to US News
New Zealand high court rules content-sharing site founder can be extradited to US

[JURIST] The New Zealand High Court [official website] ruled [judgment] on Monday that Kim Dotcom [website], the founder of content-sharing site Megaupload.com, is eligible for extradition to the US on fraud offenses. Dotcom and his alleged co-conspirators are facing numerous charges after US authorities seized Megaupload.com in 2012 [USA Today report], claiming that the site cost copyright holders at least $500 million in lost revenue. The US has sought extradition [JURIST report] for years, having to disclose an unprecedented amount of evidence for the case as far back as 2012. According to the opinion, the extradition of Dotcom falls within Article II of the New Zealand extradition treaty with the US and the New Zealand Extradition Act [texts], but not because of the sharing of copyright protected works. The ruling states that Dotcom is not eligible for extradition for these charges because “online communication of copyright protected works to the public is not a criminal offence in New Zealand.” However, the court concluded that Dotcom can be extradited on the fraud charges because they also translate to crimes in New Zealand.

File-sharing sites and the sharing of copyrighted materials continues to be a global issue. In February the Swedish Court of Patent Appeals and the Market Court [official website, in Swedish], an appellate court with exclusive jurisdiction over intellectual property cases, ordered [judgment, PDF, in Swedish] an Internet service provider (ISP) to block access to the file-sharing site The Pirate Bay and the streaming site Swefilmer [corporate websites]. In December the Federal Court of Australia ordered [JURIST report] an ISP to block five named companies and all their related websites. The same issue was decided by Irish and Dutch courts [JURIST reports] in 2013 and 2014, where the courts came to different results. The co-founder of Pirate Bay, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, has also been involved in several lawsuits over alleged hacking. In 2013 a Swedish court found him guilty [JURIST report] of hacking and fraud and sentenced him to two years in prison, which was later reduced [JURIST report] to one year. In 2014 he was found guilty [JURIST report] by a Danish court of hacking into public records.