Kim Dotcom

113
Kim Dotcom bigraphy, stories - Criminals

Kim Dotcom : biography

21 January 1974 –

Kim Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz; 21 January 1974 in Kiel, Germany"Der Unfassbare", Berliner Morgenpost, 12 February 2001 ), also known as Kimble,{} and Kim Tim Jim Vestor is a German-Finnish Internet entrepreneur, currently residing in New Zealand. He is the founder of Megaupload and its associated websites, as well as Megaupload’s successor site, Mega.

He rose to fame in Germany in the 1990s as an alleged hacker and internet entrepreneur. He was convicted of several crimes, and received a suspended prison sentence in 1994 for computer fraud and data espionage, and another suspended prison sentence in 2003 for insider trading and embezzlement.

In January 2012, the New Zealand Police placed him in custody in response to US charges of criminal copyright infringement in relation to his Megaupload website. Dotcom was accused of costing the entertainment industry $500 million through pirated content uploaded to his file-sharing site, which had 150 million registered users.http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-15/kim-dotcom-pirate-king Dotcom has vigorously denied the charges, and is fighting the attempt to extradite him to the United States. Despite legal action still pending over Megaupload, Kim launched a new project/website named "Mega" in January 2013, opened to the public exactly one year after Megaupload was shut down. It is a cloud storage service that uses encryption to protect users from government or third party "spies" from invading users’ privacy.

Developments in extradition case

On 28 June 2012, Dotcom had another victory in the High Court of New Zealand when Justice Helen Winkelmann found that the warrants used to seize Dotcom’s property were invalid because they were too broad. "These categories of items were defined in such a way that they would inevitably capture within them both relevant and irrelevant material. The police acted on this authorization. The warrants could not authorise seizure of irrelevant material, and are therefore invalid." News emerged later that the Crown knew it was using the wrong order while the raid was in progress and Dotcom should have been given the chance to challenge the seizure., NZ Herald 29 June 2012 The Crown also revealed that police had handed seized hard drives to FBI staff who copied them at the police crime lab in South Auckland and sent the copies back to the US. Justice Winkelmann ruled that handing the hard drives seized in the raid to the FBI was in breach of extradition legislation and the FBI’s cloning of the hard-drives was also invalid.

Declaring the search warrants to be invalid was a significant victory for Dotcom because he was struggling to pay his mounting legal bills. At a hearing in the High Court on 28 August 2012, Justice Judith Potter allowed Dotcom to withdraw approximately NZ$6 million (US$4.8 million) from his seized funds. He was also allowed to sell nine of his cars. The amount released was to cover $2.6 million in existing legal bills, $1 million in future costs, and another $1 million in rent on his New Zealand mansion.

In May 2012 a district court judge ruled that the FBI should hand over all its evidence against Dotcom relating to the extradition bid. The Crown appealed, but the ruling was upheld by the High Court. The Crown appealed again and in March 2013, the Court of Appeal quashed the previous court decisions. Crown lawyer John Pike, on behalf of the US Government, argued that the district court had no power to make disclosure decisions in an extradition case and that "disclosure was extensive and could involve billions of emails". The Court of Appeal agreed stating that extradition hearings were not trials and the full protections and procedures for criminal trials did not apply. Dotcom’s lawyer, Paul Davison, QC, appealed to the Supreme Court. In May 2013 the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case so it will make the final decision on whether Dotcom should receive all the FBI investigation files before the extradition hearing. NZ Herald 16 May 2013