MegaUpload Founder Will Appeal Court Ruling

Kim Dotcom claimed he will take his case to Supreme Court to appeal against a court decision that a raid on his mansion in New Zealand was legal. A few days ago, the New Zealand court of appeal has overturned previous decision that the search warrants used by the police were invalid. Those warrants preceded Kim’s arrest and were used to seize 135 electronic items from his house, including laptops, PCs, hard drives, flash sticks and servers two years ago.

Now the appeals court ruled that those warrants were not defective enough to consider them entirely invalid. Kim Dotcom immediately tweeted that he wasn’t giving up the fight against extradition to the US.

The appeals court pointed out that the defects in the warrants “hadn’t caused any significant prejudice to the respondents beyond the prejudice caused inevitably by the execution of a search warrant”. Two years ago the raid in Dotcom’s mansion was carried out at the request of the US Department of Justice. Since then, the authority has been trying to extradite Kim and his three co-accused, Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram Van der Kolk, on criminal charges including copyright violation and racketeering. Those charges relate to the operators of now-defunct file-sharing portal called MegaUpload.

Although the court of appeal overturned the ruling on the validity of the search warrants used by the police, it upheld the high court’s decision that clones of Kim’s data shouldn’t have been transferred to the US. At the time, forensic clones of electronic items were created and handed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which took them to the United States in March 2012. Both courts agreed that this should only have happened if NZ’s solicitor general gave permission. But he had not.

John Key, the New Zealand Prime Minister, admitted in the end of 2012 that there had been pre-raid spying on Kim Dotcom by the Government Communications Security Bureau, and it was illegal, because MegaUpload founder was a New Zealand resident. After the government passed new laws allowing the GCSB to engage in such surveillance, a civil rights outcry was heard from distance.