Kim Dotcom is being extradited to the US for criminal charges relating to the defunct file-sharing website Megaupload, the New Zealand justice minister has said.
Dotcom, who has a New Zealand residency, has been fighting extradition to the US since 2012 following an FBI-ordered raid on his Auckland mansion.
In 2017, the high court in New Zealand first approved his extradition, with an appeal court reaffirming the finding the year after.
In 2020, the country’s supreme court again affirmed the finding but opened the door for a fresh round of judicial review.
However, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has signed an extradition order for Dotcom, a spokesperson said on Thursday.
“I considered all of the information carefully and have decided that Mr Dotcom should be surrendered to the US to face trial,” Goldsmith said.
“As is common practice, I have allowed Mr Dotcom a short period of time to consider and take advice on my decision. I will not, therefore, be commenting further at this stage.”
Dotcom posted on X on Tuesday:
“The obedient US colony in the South Pacific just decided to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload.”
Dotcom also faces money laundering and racketeering.
He has long argued that he should not be held liable for copyright infringement carried out using his filesharing service, which allowed users to upload content and share the link with others to download it.
“New Zealand copyright law (92b) makes it clear that an ISP can’t be criminally liable for actions of their users,” Dotcom said in 2017, after the high court first ruled against him.
“Unless you’re Kim Dotcom?”
But the high court disagreed, arguing that under New Zealand law, the conduct could be categorized as a type of fraud, opening the way to Dotcom’s extradition.
The Guardian reported:
US authorities say Dotcom and three other Megaupload executives cost film studios and record companies more than $500m (about £390m) by encouraging paying users to store and share copyrighted material, which generated more than $175m in revenue for the website.
The site was formally based in Hong Kong until 2012 when the US seized the domain names and closed down the website.
But it survived, relaunching in 2013 as Mega, with a New Zealand domain name. Dotcom has had no involvement in the company since at least 2015; it now bills itself as an “online privacy” service and is run by a New Zealander, Shane Te Pou (also known as Shane Phillips), who joined as its human resources director.
Finn Batato, Megaupload’s chief marketing officer, technical officer, co-founder Mathias Ortmann, and Dutch national Bram van der Kolk were arrested in Auckland with Dotcom in 2012.
Ortmann and Van der Kolk entered plea deals and were sentenced in 2023 in New Zealand but were allowed to avoid extradition.
Batato died in 2022 in New Zealand.
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