Extradition

via Stuff – Reuters

Kirsty Johnson reports

The Government has lost its bid to keep its spy agency out of the Kim Dotcom legal battle, meaning it will have to appear in court and be sued alongside police.

A Court of Appeal judgment, released today, has also slammed the Crown for failing to follow proper procedure and has asked them to better co-operate with Dotcom’s lawyers so the case can be determined as “expeditiously” as possible.

Dotcon is  just throwing as many legal spanners in the works as he can, and the last thing he is interested in is anything being dealt with “expeditiously”.

It is very much in his interest to delay his  inevitable extradition by trying to delay and distract, be it with a public charm offensive or through the courts.

It seems the press have gone off him a bit over the last month or two.  It is clear that his Paul Homes stunt backfired, and he hasn’t recovered from it, preferring to lie low in the mean time.   Read more »

Our media is full of stories about the plucky fat German taking his case all the way to the Supreme Court.

The subtext is that this lovely underdog will keep battling the evil empire. So clearly his PR is still working a treat on our repeaters, it helps of course that one major daily has embedded journalists working with his lawyers.

But step outside New Zealand and the harsh reality for this convicted crook is plain for all to see.

Guardian covers the facts

US prosecutors have won a court case that brings them a step closer in their attempts to have the Megaupload founder and three of his colleagues extradited from New Zealand.

The appeals court in Wellington overturned an earlier ruling that would have allowed Kim Dotcom and the others broad access to evidence in the case against them at the time of their extradition hearing, which is scheduled for August. The four are accused of facilitating massive copyright fraud through the internetfilesharing site.

The court ruled that extensive disclosure would bog down the process and that a summary of the US case would suffice.

Dotcom, a German national, says he is innocent and cannot be held responsible for others using the site to illegally download songs and films. Along with him, US prosecutors are seeking the extraditions of Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, each of whom held senior positions at Megaupload before American authorities shut the site down in 2012.

Paul Davison, one of Dotcom’s lawyers, said he planned to appeal at New Zealand’s supreme court. Dotcom’s legal team must first submit an application to the court which will then decide whether an appeal has enough merit to proceed.

In its ruling the appeals court found that full disclosure of evidence was not necessary at the extradition hearing because the hearing was not the venue to determine guilt or innocence. The court pointed out that the legal obligation on the US was simply to prove it had a valid case.

The court also found that extradition treaties are essentially agreements between governments and “even though courts play a vital part in the process, extradition is very much a government to government process”

The sooner this fat german crook is put on a plane the better.

Today the Court of Appeal handed Kim DotCon a spanking, which is an image that requires me to bleach my eyes.

Kim Dotcom has lost the latest round of his extradition battle with US authorities.

A court has ruled the US does not have to hand over the source documents it relies on in its extradition case against Megaupload founder Dotcom.

The Court of Appeal has overturned a High Court decision that ordered the disclosure of the documents that are the basis of the case against Dotcom.

The court said extradition hearings were not trials and the full range of protections and procedures for criminal trials did not apply to extradition.  Read more »

ᔥ Boing Boing

With all the fuss over our Fat Jolly German friend this is amusing:

This anonymously funded movie satirizing the corruption of the copyright system in the USA has been viewed more than 10,000,000 times. The creators, who maintain the website political-prostitution.com, explain that “the U.S. Government is making a major push to enforce its laws abroad with complete disregard for sovereignty of other nations in order to extradite so-called ‘criminals’ to the US where they will be tried for their ‘crimes’ in American court.”

Are Your Politicians For Sale? from Political Prostitution on Vimeo.

ᔥ NZ Herald

If I was the crown solicitor I would be immediately seeking to move the Dotcom case from Judge David Harvey…it seems he has been injudicious with his comments recently. While agree with him on the issue of copyright and the TPP the fact remains that he is a Judge and is sitting on a case that involves copyright and extradition…making comments like that could easily be seen as prejudicial.

The judge due to hear Kim Dotcom’s extradition case has referred to the United States as “the enemy” in a discussion about copyright law.

District Court Judge David Harvey has heard parts of the case against the Megaupload founder, who was arrested with three colleagues in January after a request from the United States. The FBI has accused Dotcom and others working at Megaupload website of the world’s biggest case of criminal copyright violation.

Judge Harvey is not due to hear the internet mogul’s extradition case until next year but made his views on copyright known during the launch of the “Fair Deal” campaign last week.

…

It is legal in New Zealand to use methods to get around these regional codes and make the DVDs watchable but Judge Harvey said the TPP would change this.

“Under TPP and the American Digital Millennium copyright provisions you will not be able to do that, that will be prohibited… if you do you will be a criminal – that’s what will happen. Even before the 2008 amendments it wasn’t criminalised. There are all sorts of ways this whole thing is being ramped up and if I could use Russell [Brown's] tweet from earlier on: we have met the enemy and he is [the] U.S.”

Judge Harvey’s remark is a play on the line “we have met the enemy and he is us” by American cartoonist Walt Kelly.