Justice minister signs extradition order for Megaupload founder 12 years after FBI-ordered raid over filesharing site

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/27004668

Kim Dotcom, who is facing criminal charges relating to the defunct file-sharing website Megaupload, is to be extradited to the US, the New Zealand justice minister has said.

German-born Dotcom has New Zealand residency and has been fighting extradition to the US since 2012 following an FBI-ordered raid on his Auckland mansion.

The justice minister, Paul Goldsmith, had 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 in a statement.

In a post on X on Tuesday, Dotcom said: “The obedient US colony in the South Pacific just decided to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload,” in what appears to be a reference to the extradition order.

  • CrabAndBroom@lemmy.mlEnglish
    41·
    3 months ago

    He may well have broken the law, and he may well be a bit of a dick (I don’t know, but I’m basing this off off comments I’ve seen), but the thing that’s confusing me about this is, why is this America’s business?

    As far as I can tell Dotcom is German-born with New Zealand residence (so presumably still a German citizen?) and the article says:

    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.

    The only connection I can see this having to the US is that it cost some US corporations some money, but then that’s surely true for a bunch of other countries as well. I highly doubt it was only US content being pirated. Why does the US get to be in charge of this?

    Also, if this is illegal, why aren’t they arresting the CEO of Google for Google Drive? You pay for that, and there’s a ton of pirated stuff on there. Same with Discord. And those are actually based in the US.