The U.S. Department of Justice announced Friday that it is officially filing a case against Kim Dotcom.
Kim Dotcom is a German-Finnish businessman and hacker based in New Zealand. He founded Megaupload in 2005 which is popular for its websites that ran online services related to file storage and viewing. The site has been shut down by the U.S DOJ in 2012 for violating the copyright infringement law.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. DOJ is sueing the top executives Megaupload who call themselves “modern pirates” after admitting in a Skype conversation that they profited a lot from users sharing illegal copies of videos and movies.
In the 191-page document released by the federal prosecutors, DOJ presents its lawsuit against the company behind a “cyberlocker” site, which let users upload files. The site is also considered the leading instrument for promoting pirate contents by the prosecutors and entertainment industry.
In 2010, Megaupload Ltd. was placed under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In January 2012, its founder Kim Dotcom was arrested in his mansion in New Zealand.
However, due to an extradition they are facing in New Zealand, the defendants, Mr. Dotcom and a handful of his associates, were not able to make a formal appearance in a U.S. court on Friday, where they are charged with copy infringement, racketeering, and money laundering in the U.S.
Though not physically present in the court hearing, they denied the accusations through their lawyer Ira P. Rothken.
Mr. Rothken argued in an interview with WSJ that his client can’t be arraigned for copyright infringement performed by its sites’ users. Once the charge falls, other charges will be non-sense saying, “It’s like a house of cards,” he added.
The case document presents a peek at Megaupload, citing e-mails and transcripts of Skype conversations among the site’s headship.
In one of the cited e-mails dated February 2007, the site’s programming director Bram van der Kolk told the Megaupload’s CTO, Mathias Ortmann, “Kim really wants to copy YouTube one to one.”
In another cited message Mr. van der Kolk allegedly told Mr. Ortmann, “We're modern pirates :-)" in a September 2007 conversation on Skype, allegedly adding: "People will always share files and download their stuff for free."
Mr. van der Kolk purportedly told Mr. Ortmann, "We're modern pirates :-),” and added, “People will always share files and download their stuff for free.”
A couple of years later, Mr. van der Kolk told Mr. Ortmann in a Skype message, “If copyright holders would really know how big our business is they would surely try to do something against it.”
He added, “They have no idea that we're making millions in profit every month,” pertaining to the profit they have garnered through Megaupload and affiliated sites and premium subscription fees, amounting to $25 million and $150 million, respectively.
Mr. Rothken said in the report that the charges are affecting the rights of Internet users.
“The Justice Department is putting the interests of Hollywood ahead of those of cloud-storage customers,” said Mr. Rothken.
