Kim Dotcom can be extradited to US but can also appeal | Hacker News Reader

Kim Dotcom can be extradited to US but can also appeal

bbc.com

237 pointsBender198 comments

Legal conflict is brutal. It takes an incredible emotional toll over time. Even when you're not thinking about it, you're thinking about it. I had forgotten about this, but the fact that it's been going on this long would have taken a tremendous toll on him and his family as it hangs over them. Whether or not you think he's guilty, it's worth considering the punishment that's already been dealt.

As an aside: I've been involved in two major lawsuits (just corporate stuff) and you can always tell those that haven't been through the process by their willingness to sue. It's a massive distraction that has a huge opportunity cost. Avoid if you can and keep focusing on creating awesome.

At this point I feel that this is 15 years old and really not worth pursuing. It probably wasn't in the first case.

Is Dotcom his real name?

> Is Dotcom his real name?

IIRC, legally yes.

it is his legal name, though I doubt it was his original surname at birth.

Yes he legally changed his surname in 2005. His name at birth was Kim Schmitz. Funnily enough there are petitions to have him change his surname again to Kim Dotcodotnz. Doesn't roll off the tongue as well though.

Dot-koh-doh-tenz

I mean, it's not the one he was born with, but it's definitely the one he's known by. Whether he executed the relevant legal documents, I don't know, but I don't think it's important either.

Fun fact, the person born Gordon Sumner's kids call him "Sting".

It's his legal name and actually is on the indictments and other legal docs -

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/documents/meg...

He was born as Kim Schmitz

born in Kiel, Germany

.. and still quite a few germans whom he [allegedly] betrayed would like to have a word with him, in person -- including few german attorneys

This sounds interesting, can you share more details?

Kim used to brag about snooping on the documents he hosted for people and ratting people out to authorities and/or blackmailing them.

The trail of bridges burned is quite long and starts in the mid-90s. His early handle was Kimble and he used to hack companies and sell their secrets for money (like PBX access) and did typical war dialer/phreaker/credit fraud scams you'd expect from '90s blackhats.

He came into some money thanks to some German friends of his, one who worked at Lufthansa, and exploited that to "go legit" even though it mostly wasn't his own skills that he was trading on. He still ended up perpetrating a few frauds afterwards that cost friends and investors a lot of money. Look into Monkey AG and Monkeybank.

Why anyone trusts him with their data or investments has always puzzled the hell out of me.

I think people, especially "hackers", just have short memories. It's similar to how like Kirtaner is getting a lot of press right now for going after QAnon (he just had a Reddit AMA), even though the 420chan he hosted in its early years was a hot bed for child abuse imagery and even had a secret /pedo/ board. He also lies about founding Anonymous, which is kind of funny because of what I just said and the whole "we do not forgive, we do not forget" thing.

Jax also finally got called out on her scumbag past recently (although not all of it...) and I'm surprised how rarely this happens...given how much dirty laundry is out in the open...

I think he built a lot of good will among the broader internet community with his general nose-thumbing towards the US government and MPAA/RIAA. for most people, the history of kim dotcom begins and ends with megaupload. besides that, how much do you really need (or expect) to trust a host for your infringing files?

He's also (or, at least, was at one point) roughly the size of a mountain. Well, The Mountain, specifically. That is to say that he's larger than life. I think some people just find his antics entertaining (as long as they're not on the receiving end).

And participated in the Gumball.

> I think people, especially "hackers", just have short memories.

Given the lifelong stigma related to being a felon I would say society does not have a short memory.

In the case of Kim, he got away by leaving Germany, and by using the Internet as an international tool (ie. used Mega to do business world-wide, including in Germany).

If you (reader) are interested in learning more about Kim, last time I checked his Wikipedia page is a solid start.

According to you, if somebody is on the lam for so many years, the government should drop all charges.

By the way, it has been eight years; January 2012 is when he was arrested in New Zealand for extradition.

I had honestly forgotten about this since it's been ongoing for so long. Some of the more notorious details of the case:

The lengthy legal saga also saw the initial search warrant was challenged in court, which led to the discovery of unlawful spying on Dotcom by the Government Communications Security Bureau in 2013.

In 2017, police were also believed to have paid Dotcom a six-figure sum in a private settlement over alleged unreasonable force.

In 2018, Dotcom also tried and failed to have former US President Barack Obama served with a subpoena to force him to give evidence in the High Court over a damages claim for Megaupload.

I honestly thought after they found unlawful spying that would've been the end of the case. I guess I was a bit naive.

The disproportionate response against Kim Dotcom is such a joke, and the joke is increasingly on us U.S. taxpayers I’d wager.

I think separation of church and state was a good ideal, but now more than ever it feels like we need separation of corporation and state.

Lawyers saw that he was very rich so they predicted a decades long legal battle and made it happen. That's my guess.

I sometimes wonder if US prosecution of these "crimes" is more about attempting to drain the defendant of money through legal fees rather than trying to get any sort of conviction.

It is also a show of force intended to deter others from trying .

Its like the drug war- after the US went after Escobar and Noriega nothing changed. Someone will always step in to fill the void.

The way the US legal system works, a conviction is frequently only possible if a rich defendant is first drained of money.

This has nothing to do with innocence or guilt.

The unfortunate thing is they’re all coupled and non-separated: church, corporation, and state.

How are the church and state coupled? A corporation can bribe politicians with money, but what can a religious institution do?

People vote based on their opinions. Their opinions can be influenced by many things. Sometimes their opinions are influenced by their religious affiliation. Sometimes their opinions are influenced by comments on HN. But HN has no actual leverage over the state and neither does the church.

This is a little tricky. A church cannot voice a political opinion, if they want to keep their 501 tax exemption. They can voice their opinions (1st amendment) but they'd give up those specific tax exemptions and would need to move to a different charity type. (This is why the ACLU has two organizations, one you can donate to with tax exemption and the other you cannot because they lobby the government).

Is there anything wrong with a church abandoning their 501 tax exemption and voicing a political opinion?

There isn't but unfortunately what has been happening lately is churches have been voicing political opinion and not losing their 501 tax exemption because the politicians they have been speaking in favor of protect them from losing their tax status.

Nothing wrong. They'd have to pay taxes. That would be a bummer for most organizations.

The way around this seems to be for politicians to voice religious opinions, which makes some things that churches say de facto political opinions.

Seems like it should be banned on their side too, but that's a bit thorny.

Exactly. A minister (etc) can certainly say "Dancing (or whatever) is a grave sin and so we must avoid it ourselves and work to keep it out of our community." Stuff like this is protected as Free (Religious) Exercise clause and it should be.

It may so happen that only one candidate vehemently opposes dancing, and as long as they don't make that connection out loud, it stays on the level.

One might argue that if a church trains its members to vote a certain way, they can wield significant influence, albeit indirectly. Similarly corporations have a great deal of indirect influence. True, there’s no formal, legal coupling, but perhaps there is merit to challenging concentrations of power, no matter how informal or indirect?

That can be said for literally any sort of organization of people

Church has much more members than other organizations.

LOL only if you group together every organized religion as "Church" and compare it to other, individual organizations.

Are you referring to the Catholic church? Most religious organizations are relatively small and independent from one another.

But most Evangelical churches vote as a block.

In many countries, trade unions have more members than churches, and they donate, endorse, and directly outright tell their members who do vote for, unlike most churches, who do not donate, do not endorse, and in almost all cases, do not outright tell members who to vote for.

Most organisations don't threaten you with eternal torture to coerce you though...

Church is different in that (as far as internal logic goes) adherence/non-adherence to their dictates involves a credible claim to the fate of your immortal soul. It's a little bit different from other book clubs.

That’s a pretty arbitrary distinction. The average union worker finds not being able to put food on the table an equally terrifying prospect as eternal damnation.

I don't know if that's self-evident, given that the average non-union worker votes quite often for the union-busters who promise to enshrine their sanctifying beliefs in law.

Money is used to buy propaganda, churches have millennia old propaganda infrastructure financed by murder and pillage, and are mostly extremely wealthy.

Any interested individual or organization can fund political propaganda, but I certainly wouldn't say the state is coupled with BLM or the NRA.

Why not? Aren't all BLM donations going to the democrats?

Maybe a notable chunk, but I'd say more accurately "to anyone but the Republicans".

It absolutely is, in the case of the latter. BLM no, or not yet, because they are not yet an entrenched reliable source of campaign funding.

Check out the history of the influence of Evangelical Christianity on American politics starting in the 1980s. Church influencing state is a contemporary phenomenon.

Church decoupled pretty well

its less of a trial these days and more about biblical retribution. In regard to Megaupload, Dotcom says he believes the company had actively tried to prevent copyright infringement – its terms of service forced users to agree they would not post copyrighted material to the website. Companies or individuals with concerns that their copyright material was being posted on Megaupload were given direct access to the website to delete infringing links. If it went to trial, im doubtful the RIAA has a slam-dunk case at all considering the bulk of their evidence was illegally collected. Justice Winkelmann ruled that the handing of hard drives seized by New Zealand police in the raid to the FBI was in breach of extradition legislation, and the FBI's removal from New Zealand of cloned data from them was unlawful.

in the past decade the RIAA/MPAA have increasingly gone after the idea of piracy instead of actual piracy. Tor and end-to-end encryption recently made their public shit list but theyve been wardrumming against any and all pushback against the DMCA for a long time.

The issue, as I remember it, was that Megaupload consolidated files with the same hash that were uploaded by multiple people, so that they only kept one copy with multiple links pointing to it.

When they received a copyright notice, they would immediately remove only the link that was referenced in the notice, but would leave the file with all the other links still pointing to it. Which was the difference between "running a file-hosting service" and "knowingly hosting copyrighted material".

> Which was the difference between "running a file-hosting service" and "knowingly hosting copyrighted material".

Every digital file is copyrighted (in practice). Some people are allowed to distribute some files, others aren't. You are claiming it's up to him to know who were allowed and who were not, but I don't thing that's clear in any way.

Can’t you argue that they have no way to know whether the other links are also infringing or whether those other users have a legitimate license for the content?

Let’s say I buy and losslessly rip a DVD and upload it to Megaupload as a backup or to have access to it on the go. I don’t share the link with anyone and thus don’t infringe on the copyright by redistributing the content publicly.

Now someone else buys the same DVD, rips it the same way and ends up with the exact same file (so their link actually points to my file because of deduplication), however they then decide to infringe on the copyright by distributing the link publicly.

Their link should indeed be disabled, but the original file should stay (with its other links) as there is no way to tell whether those other links are used legitimately.

>Can’t you argue that they have no way to know whether the other links are also infringing or whether those other users have a legitimate license for the content?

IANAL so maybe the plausible deniability here is enough legal protection, but this is an argument that rings hollow to me from a technical perspective. Usually content ripped from physical media is not stored in its original format, especially during the timeline of MegaUpload's existence. The data is going to be encoded in a different format and therefore could have a variety of different potential hashes. A bunch of people having exactly the same version of this media indicates that it is a single encoding being repeatedly shared.

Media encoders are generally deterministic. If you use two different encoders or two different configurations you'll get two different outputs, but two people using a given popular encoder with its default settings on the same input are generally going to get identical output.

two things.

> Let’s say I buy and losslessly rip a DVD and upload it to Megaupload as a backup or to have access to it on the go. I don’t share the link with anyone and thus don’t infringe on the copyright by redistributing the content publicly.

this right here is (sadly) already a DMCA violation for the person who rips the DVD. I'm not sure whether or not that makes it a different situation for megaupload vs. a person uploading a rip of a DVD they didn't own in the first place.

second, the lawyers can probably argue that megaupload knew (or should have known) how widely each upload was being distributed. it's hard to argue you don't know that infringement is going on if you see hundreds/thousands of downloads through a link to a file whose hash matches a known illicit copy. maybe they were at least smart enough not to keep these kinds of logs, I dunno.

>this right here is (sadly) already a DMCA violation for the person who rips the DVD

Yes, because we all live in America... right? Megaupload wasn't even a US company, why should it “enforce” some foreign legislation on non-concerned parties?

I dunno, that seems like a good question for the FBI...

> Yes, because we all live in America... right?

Pretty much. The US makes other countries adopt laws that are similar to their own via trade agreements. The whole purpose of doing that is to make it easier for american businesses to sell stuff in other countries. The whole world is economically forced to converge into the same set of general laws that just happen to be very friendly to the interests of american corporations. Intellectual property laws are included in the package.

There are countries in the world where governments struggle to provide basic infrastructure to their populations. Why would anyone in such a miserable situation even care about protecting american copyright industry interests by prosecuting copyright infringement?

An MPAA official once visited my country to lobby politicians and push their agenda. Journalists asked him point blank: do you think copyright is a priority in a country where people do not have basic sanitation? I wish I had saved the article where I read that...

> Megaupload wasn't even a US company, why should it “enforce” some foreign legislation on non-concerned parties?

Good question... The US can probably just do whatever it wants though. If they hate you enough, they'll just kidnap you and fly you to wherever it is they need you to be. They call it extraordinary rendition.

This is the key to this whole farce.

Nothing he or his company did was illegal in NZ.

Put it like this: if a Pakistani courts tried to extradite Zuckerburg for blasphemy because some of Facebook's users said bad things about islam, then they'd be rightfully laughed at.

But a US court trying to extradite a NZ CEO for something the company's users did... different story. Because America.

Extradition works on the principle of dual criminality: the act has to be a crime in both countries. This is why the US won't extradite Zuckerberg to Pakistan for blasphemy, and it's also why the Dotcom case has been tied up in courts for years, because it's not clear at all if what he did was illegal under NZ law or not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_criminality

Two words unfortunately: parallel construction. [0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

This seems so evil yet it's an accepted part of law?

It might be applied for good and evil. Sometimes, a government does not want to give details because they want to reuse the method. Consider, for example, the FBI found a vulnerability in Tor, and does not want to disclose it yet does want to prosecute the perpetrator behind Silk Road.

> Tor and end-to-end encryption recently made their public shit list

I think I missed this news. Can you please elaborate?

>now more than ever it feels like we need separation of corporation and state

What a weird meme to appear twice on this page.

Corporations don't exist as an entity except via the authorisation from government.

Separating corporation and state really means giving corporations autonomous powers. That's not the conclusion that you are hoping for.

Of course corporations can exist without a government, they predate the current system and the current type of governments.

In many ways they can't as it is the state that created the markets they operate in and it is the state who helps them maintain their monopolies.

Markets form naturally from consensual interactions of goods and services for money.

I suppose you could argue the government creating the money allowed the market but alternatives currencies would be created like gold or now crypto.

Markets with particular rules that help keep monopolies in place don't form naturally. They require a state entity to enforce the rules.

Guess this means we should remove as many rules as possible to avoid monopolies.

Not at all, not conceptually and not historically.

You do realize there's many corporations today who only exist because of taxpayer bailouts or thanks to large government contracts, right?

There are humans that are being kept alive by medical machines, this doesn't mean humans can't live without machines.

>it is the state that created the markets

This is historically inaccurate.

The fact that the term "black market" exists is proof enough to demonstrate that claim.

That states have always tried their darndest (with varying degrees of success) to control markets to e.g. tax them is a better way of looking at things.

What I said is:

> it is the state that created the markets they operate in

There's many large corporations who are only still around because of the state, they wouldn't survive on the kind of market you're probably thinking of.

Without the state the big ones would turn into fiefdoms (and probably will anyway).

Black markets just operate on top of white markets, often using the same exact state-backed money. Hunter-gather groups and other social structures known to exist before states generally operated on gift economies. There's not really any anthropological evidence that markets existed prior to the formation of states. Read the first few chapters of Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber (RIP).

Let's not be disingenuous. We know what he really means. Everyone wants to end the extreme influence and entanglement that corporations have over government officials and government processes.

> Corporations don't exist as an entity except via the authorisation from government.

Eliminate corporations from being legal entities. They shield employees from their illegal actions and provide a shield against lawsuits. Then we could avoid the extra litigation necessary for Peircing the corporate veil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil

You're willfully misinterpreting the GP.

"Separation of corporation of state" should be interpreted in the same light as separation of church and state - using the state to clearly define boundaries and avoid interference on the state from the church (or corporations), not to give them autonomous and unregulated powers.

Citizens United gives corporations leeway to spend as much as they want to help elect officials and influence citizens' electoral decisions, thus inverting the power structure and reinforcing the de facto oligarchy. To separate, we need to regulate.

> using the state to clearly define boundaries and avoid interference on the state from the church

There's also a clearly defined boundary where the church is immune from government influence.

So, if the government isn't allowed to regulate what churches preach, what's the equivalent for corporations? Not being allowed to regulate what they sell?

There is at least some regulation of what churches preach. Hate speech and incitements to violence can and has brought the attention of the FBI on various churches and sects. But I would say there's already a very similar light regulation on advertisements. Truth in advertising is a thing, but not much of one.

> There is at least some regulation of what churches preach. Hate speech and incitements to violence can and has brought the attention of the FBI on various churches and sects.

I'm a bit confused here. I think we're using the word regulation differently.

I don't tend to think of regulation as paying attention to people who do legal things that happen to correlate with doing illegal things. I don't particularly like this practice, but out of the many labels I could think of to apply to it, regulation isn't one of them.

I tend to think of regulation as making a specific behavior (or perhaps a specific way of doing something) illegal, especially if there are financial penalties applied to preforming said behavior.

Would you mind elaborating on what definition you were using here? I don't think I've ever run into this particular use of the word before.

And the government doesn't exist except via the authorization of the citizens, who own and work for corporations and run and belong to churches, which is why keeping these entities from influencing each other is a pipe dream.

Same Kim Dotcom that pushed the Setch Rich conspiracy and falsely claimed to have proof that he was the leaker to WikiLeaks. I have a feeling there is more happening behind the scenes than just copyright infringement.

Wow, that's a flashback of my college years! Good times, thank you Kim!

For the nostalgia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0Wvn-9BXVc

even more nostalgia https://youtu.be/S5ZBZV8hFb4 (german)

Decade later and wow, this is just sad overall for the USA.

Does anyone know what can US courts do about him though?

Lock him up forever for Hollywood to set an example. If he is extradited, it's game over for him.

Even better: force him into suicide! It would not be the first one to get this treatment.

For copyright infringement? They don't typically "suicide" people for that. He's not Epstein.

I assume the parent is referring to Mr. Swartz, who, though technically prosecuted for computer fraud and abuse, was basically gone after for "stealing" digital copies of journal data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Put him on a rendition flight and put him in a US prison. Is that not bad enough?

that's going to be interesting - NZ is still largely closed to foreigners - would they chain him up at one end and unchain him at the other?

> that's going to be interesting - NZ is still largely closed to foreigners

He wouldn't be rendered to New Zealand - he'd be rendered from New Zealand.

New Zealand already has an agreement to allow rendition flights to the US.

> would they chain him up at one end and unchain him at the other?

Yes I guess? Seems normal to wear handcuffs or something on a rendition flight.

I think that normally he'd be accompanied by US Marshalls, if we're not letting them into the country he's not likely to be going to get onto a plane - you don't handcuff people to the seats in case there's an emergency (or they want to pee)

He should argue that because of the prevalence of Covid-19 in the United States and the inability of the US to protect even the President of the United States from Covid-19, that extradition is a possible extra legal death sentence.

Now that would be an interesting argument, hard to argue against it too.

Is he over 55? If not his chance of dying or even contracting COVID is incredibly small. It might be a valid argument to delay extradition until after the WHO declares an end to the pandemic, but not to prevent it entirely.

His age isn't, his BMI is. He's definitely at risk.

He is morbidly obese.

> or even contracting COVID is incredibly small

Citation needed to show that people under 55 are inherently more immune to COVID-19.

Given the state of the US prison system you could make a case of cruel and unusual punishment.

Because of COVID or just the state of the prison system in general? Personally, I would say either case, but the system itself is not going to agree with it. There have been reports of some people allowed to stay in house arrest rather than reporting to jail.

That doesn’t seem to work in the context of MLAT, although I imagine that it depends a little on the country and the case, even though it shouldn’t.

Note also that the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” is actually in the US constitution.

See also: Assange.

The process against Assange in the UK looked like a particularly horrible example of a kangaroo court.

But New Zealand isn't the UK.

I know nothing about the process against Kim or laws in NZ, but the comparison to Assange doesn't work.

The Five Eyes have each others’ backs. As we can see with Assange, the law doesn’t even factor in to it.

You can't really make a case for unusual, given the state of the US prison system.

The extradition case is made in the context of New Zealand though.

Over-imprisonment isn't the reason, fear of death is. The fact that the US prison system is rampant doesn't really make the living condition of one given inmate unusually cruel. The high risk of them catching a deadly disease does.

I think what GP is saying is that Kim’s probable treatment in the US criminal justice system would not be unusual, it would in fact be the usual treatment for US inmates. Inmates in the US regularly fear for and lose their lives, pandemic or no pandemic.

The cruelty point stands though.

This argument has been used successfully in EU.

Could you please reference that for me?

not quite true anymore. European countries such as Germany, France, and Italy are having major second waves. Initially, it seemed like the US was doing worse than the world but other countries have succumbed to second waves.

But he's coming from New Zealand, one of the safest countries as far as COVID, to the US, the #1 country in COVID deaths.

*recorded

funnily enough that's actually how I was allowed to marry my Austrian wife.

She was pregnant this summer and we tried to get married but because I had an american birth certificate I wasn't allowed to, because the certificate didn't have an "apostille" which is a stamp that can only be issued by the state of birth (Austin,TX) but we live in Austria (Europe).

I found a legal loop hole that stated if your birth certificate was lost in a war or would be substantially hard to get, you can get married without the certificate.

Thanks to the shutdown and the whole COVID desaster in the USA I was able to make the legal case for it and I was allowed to marry her :)

Congratulations! Refreshing to hear some good news from 2020.

Out of the loop here: Do US courts have jurisdiction over that guy?

US courts have jurisdiction over nearly anyone they want, due to the US's soft power projected on the rest of the world.

Well... yes. But obviously to some limit. I don't think the US could extradite someone over matters that don't involve the something in the country.

Where is copyright infringement located?

In every so-called "free trade" agreement.

I am from Brazil...

During cold war, any kind of suspected "socialism" seemly counted as "something to do with USA" because a bunch of people were thrown out of helicopters (literally) when they couldn't be extradited.

Same for all Operation Condor countries.

It is a trick to avoid prosecution. When no body is found, it is hard to prove the person is dead and therefore hard to prosecute the perpetrators of the murder.

>But obviously to some limit

The only actual limit is if you hide in Russia or China.

I've read that France will not extradite a French citizen. So that's one other place to hide, if you're a French citizen. You won't escape justice that way, I think - if necessary they'll try you in France for a murder you committed in the US - but you'll escape US justice.

I couldn't believe that so I read up on it.

And indeed, https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/french-law-prohibits-ext... claims that French law says that France will not extradite its own citizens. And they have written that into every treaty they sign. For example http://www.mcnabbassociates.com/France%20International%20Ext... is the treaty with the USA and it includes:

Article 3(1) declares that neither State has an obligation to extradite its own nationals, but the executive authority of the United States shall have the discretion to do so. The nationality of the person sought shall be the nationality of the person at the time the offense was committed.

Article 3(2) requires a State that refuses an extradition request solely on the basis of the nationality of the person sought to submit the case to its authorities for prosecution, if so requested by the Requesting State.

It appears that you are entirely correct!

However, France is also subject to the European Arrest Warrant, which means they are "precluded from refusing the surrender of their own nationals wanted for the purposes of prosecution, but they may condition the surrender of a requested person on his or her being returned to the issuing state to serve any sentence ultimately imposed". This is obviously only for other European countries, but I bet you could then extradite from such a country to extra-EU jurisdictions simply with political help.

So let's say person X is wanted in the US. They get Country A to emit a warrant for them, A gets X from France, then extradites X to the US.

An example would be Roman Polanski who fled to France while awaiting sentencing in the US.

Also I think Germany will only extradite to EU countries.

Italy will also refuse extradition depending on the charges. Capital punishment for minors has been a sticky subject for several countries.

If you make good movies, France is fine with you raping minors in USA.

They would let you in just to spite the US.

I'd doubt he would be extradited if he was in his country of citizenship

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think US claims jurisdiction over anything that involves a transaction in USD. And because of the way international payment systems are set up, there always is a USD transaction somewhere in the loop.

If a Danish customer takes his Danish Krones to the bank and sends them to a supplier in Germany in the form on Euros, the transaction goes like DKK → USD → EUR, so US claims jurisdiction over it and enforces its domestic laws on it:

https://www.icenews.is/2012/03/04/us-confiscates-policemans-...

And it doesn't even have to be an international transaction. Even domestic ones sometime run afoul of this limitation, as this Canadian small business owner found out:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/square-canada-1.53031...

Sounds and read more like an very rare case where it is not even clear if this holds up in court.

Not really. This is how US is able to unilaterally impose sanctions on Iran. Since international transactions go through USD, they have effectively cut Iran from being able to transact with the rest of the world on a meaningful scale. European countries tried to build an alternative to circumvent the need for a USD layer, but it has not been successful. USD's unique position in the international stage allows US to impose its domestic policy on a large part of the world. From Washington Post:

> The power of U.S. sanctions lies in the use of the U.S. dollar in most international transactions. A foreign company that sends its proceeds from trade with Iran through an international bank would likely face sanctions because part of it would be conducted in dollars. An international company with an American employee who has something to do with a transaction, no matter how inconsequential, could also run afoul of U.S. sanctions.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/iran-...

I have heard of this exact thing, but can't find the information about it. I think it was a Matt Levine article?.

I'm so hazy on the details, other than that French nationals were prosecuted for alleged crimes in France because those crimes were denominated in US currency.

Edit: My memory must be wrong - there's a comment below that France will not extradite citizens

Not soft power. Military/political/financial power ( pax americana ). NZ is part of the vassal/ally network we have all around the world.

The US has tons of soft power in china, russia, etc, but no real influence in either because we have no political/military dominion over them. At least not yet.

Canada is a prime example. Canada has "soft power" in china but still their "citizens/spies" are arrested and they have to beg the US/EU to help free their "citizens/spies" in china. And for all the mocking of Trump that canada loves to do, when trump cracks the whip and tells them to arrest a chinese executive, they do it. It wasn't Trump's "soft power" that made canada jump, that's for sure. It isn't trump's "soft power" that make sweden, britain, etc side with him over china either.

Neither pax americana, pax romana, pax mongolica, etc were built around soft power. Actually the dependence on "soft power" probably signaled the end of pax romana, pax mongolica, etc.

Can you make this specific? What exactly did the U.S. do/threaten to get Canada to arrest a Chinese executive? Obviously, it wasn't a threat of military invasion, but I'm open to some other possibility.

Well kinda. US and NZ have an extradition treaty. But that's for criminal and not civil law. The unfortunate thing is that copyright is treated as criminal rather than civil (in the US), so they have claimed jurisdiction.

I always thought the US doesn't extradite its citizens? Why woud an other country extradite its citizens to the US when the US wouldn't its citizens?

due to an imbalance of power

France is weaker than USA and doesn't extradite its citizens.

I'd bet my ass that France does extradite tons of people, maybe just less for certain categories of highly-visible political crimes. They participate in INTERPOL and obviously obey the European Arrest Warrant since 2002. The era of France being a sanctuary for violent leftist activists is long gone.

France does not extradite its own citizens. It's an unconditional constitutional right of French citizens not to be extradited from France.

Of course, France today has provisions to prosecute someone in France for a crime committed elsewhere, which satisfies their European neighbours for the most part.

The European Arrest Warrant effectively supersedes any constitutional right to non-extradition: "EU countries can no longer refuse to surrender [to other EU members] their own nationals, unless they take over the execution of the prison sentence against the wanted person" [1]. EU members with extradition impediments like France are left with a right to get back prisoners after conviction, to spend the punishment in their own country. There are exceptions and rules but "constitution says no" is not one of them (or at least I could not find it even in the proper text of the Decision [2], and is not mentioned in any note on the matter).

This said, a "bad" EU members might well choose to extradite further, once a prisoner is obtained from France. I expect this would trigger appeals at the ECJ and possibly repercussions for the "bad" country, but in the meantime the prisoner might well be gone. I also don't know what the "punishment" would be for a country that refused to execute a valid EAW. I guess this sort of thing is left to ECJ judges.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/cross-border-cases/judicial-co...

[2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

Such laws do not supersede the constitutions of its sovereign member nations. If a member nation's constitution requires something that would place them in violation a treaty agreement, then it would have to fix its constitution or be in violation. The treaty itself doesn't change municipal law, though. (Unless it's a country where it does, anyway. But France is not one of them.)

> unless they take over the execution of the prison sentence against the wanted person

Yes, that bit. France still cannot extradite its citizens, but it can meet its obligations to its partners by prosecuting and incarcerating someone within France.

Extradition treaty does not mean automatic extradition and is not limited to its own citizens.[1]

It just means there is a framework for granting a request.

There are two types list treaties and dual crime. Dual crime means it has to be crime in both countries, list treaty mean applies to only specific lists of crimes

There are other restrictions that could be limiting, some countries won't extradite if the death penality is a possibility, some will not extradite its citizen's but will do visitors or residents etc.

As with all deals, there will be always some other items in play while the treaty was negotiated and signed, recognizing or supporting the other country's claim, trade agreements, tariff reduction etc. Depending on the size of the partner the deal will be favourable or not.

[1] For example Assange is Australian in UK being extradited to the U.S.

The USA does extradite its citizens to other countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_extradit... has a list of countries that the USA can extradite to, and they reciprocate.

The USA just happens to be more aggressive about seeking extradition than most.

> The USA just happens to be more aggressive about seeking extradition than most

The USA has taken an expansionist view to the definition of jurisdiction, particularly for network-related activity. In short, they basically claim jurisdiction everywhere. That's something that very few other countries can realistically try to pull off without people laughing in their face, and its success is entirely due to might.

The US routinely extradites its own citizens with countries it has extradition treaties with. Canada is the most obvious example, and literally hundreds of Americans are deported to Canada to stand trial for alleged offences in that country every year.

Very rarely, it does become political.

The only ones who can stand up the US and win is China- as some poor Canadian diplomat is findidng out.

> The unfortunate thing is that copyright is treated as criminal rather than civil (in the US)...

Only if the infringement is for financial gain, otherwise the infringement is treated as a civil matter. Also, the government must show the act was willful. Whether the infringement is a treated as a misdemeanor or felony is dependent on certain thresholds set in the statute.

If US, or ANY other country court, claims damages to anything under their jurisdiction, they are free to pursue whatever and whoever they want for making justice. Another question whether they can lawfully extract someone from alien territory, hence the brawl.

Jurisdiction can not be over a guy or a gal, it's about where and which crime happened. Person's citizenship can play a role in a process of extradition as countries generally protect their own citizens from it, but in this case Kim Dotcom is not a citizen of New Zealand.

> Kim Dotcom is not a citizen of New Zealand.

Which prompts the question of whether he has applied for citizenship.

Apparently that is an option for people who have lived in the country for at least 5 years, but it is subject to "good character" requirements and possibly some degree of political consideration, so it may not be enough for him to solely rely on being deemed innocent until proven guilty.

Extraterritorial jurisdiction can apply based on citizenship

Yes. Dotcom ran a business that had operations in the US. It makes no difference where somebody resides or if they have ever been to a country. If I live in France and hire a team of people to rob a bank in the US, I have committed crime in the US.

You would think somebody with past convictions for insider trading, credit card fraud, hacking, and embezzlement would be a bit smarter about his next criminal enterprise.

FYI -- Don't locate a data center in the US if plan on breaking US laws.

TPB’s servers are running in Sweden last I checked, but the US still claims jurisdiction over them

The US has not asserted a claim over the machines in Sweden.

No.

Time for Kim to buy a metric ton of Bitcoin.

Baffling anyone defending Kim Dotcom.

The dude gets mega rich based on creating a platform with the sole purpose of storing/distributing pirated media. (his 2019 estimate net worth is $200 million)

You can look at piracy in a billion different ways; but when you specifically create a platform to make money off piracy that crosses the line.

It is so weird that internationally he is only know for that. He did many things that are much much worse.

So much this. Basically his entire life seems predicated on a firm conviction that he's entitled to the fruits of other people's labor: Fraud, stock manipulation, embezzlement, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom

Finally, he hit on the perfect crime, in that a large part of society seems to be willing to take the side of somebody making $200M off other people's music over the musicians wanting to make a living off their music, no matter what the law actually says.

[Hail caesar, those about to be downvoted salute you]

There is this thing about legal protections only being valid if they apply to the people the public won't like. Otherwise, they are useless.

He did plenty of despicable things, and should pay for them (he is, isn't he?). At the same time, that extradition is wrong.

Seriously. Some major rose-tinted glasses going on here. It's also hard to see anyone see this guy and how he presents himself and think, "wow, what a cool dude! I wish I could be more like him!" Like on a purely personal level, there are people in the tech world who think this is someone who has done well at life and they'd like being friends with him and spending time with him if only they could. This guy is and always has been the Icy Hot Stuntaz of the hacker world and it's super revealing when people seem to default to being on his side because they think he's like "one of us" or whatever.

I have no problem with people arguing about the pros and cons of copyright law and where the lines should be drawn and who's responsible for what, but it's really hard to take anyone seriously who thinks Kim Dotcom of all people seems like a pretty cool guy. None of this has anything to do with who's right in this case or whether or not he should be extradited, it's just a really inexplicable undercurrent to any discussion about him.

Nice

What waste of Time. Us corporations and state Should be separated just Like the church.

You can argue whether what he did is illegal /immoral or not, but the state is here to (among other things) protect property and the marketplace. If I break into Boeing and steal something shouldn't the government pursue me or should Boeing hire the Pinkertons?-

Kim also did stock market manipulation and „stole“ over a million dollars from investors who believed his lies.

Kim didn't break into anything and didn't steal anything. He made it easy to share information, that's it [if we're talking about Megaupload only].

I was not talking about Megaupload.

What are you talking about then? Is he being convicted for other crimes? I thought the extradition case is about Megaupload only.

The extradition is for Megaupload - as far as I know. My perception of him is based on all the crimes he committed. I was making a moral case - not a legal one.

Just a reminder that you can simultaneously be against the current copyright system in the US while also thinking Kim Dotcom is a criminal that deserves punishment. Too many people in this thread or forcing this into a false dichotomy. Flaws in the current system don't fully excuse his misdeeds many of which are unrelated to copyright.

Or to put it in another context, you can both be against the war on drugs while also thinking that El Chapo belongs in prison.

Your post hints at other "crimes".

Care to elaborate or post a link?

I couldn't find any documentation on the exact breakdown of the 12 of the 13 charges in this case that were approved for extradition, but here[1] is an article from 2017 that lists he is being charged with copyright infringement, money laundering, racketeering, and wire fraud.[2] It appears that the 1 that was thrown out was related to money laundering. That means there is still racketeering and wire fraud charges plus there could have been multiple money laundering charges in the original list.

This also doesn't include any of the shady behavior in which there were accusations of but weren't included in the legal case. Such as the staff of MegaUpload regularly rummaging through the files of users. That likely isn't technically a crime, but it is something that should certainly be frowned on by the HN community.

[2] - https://fr.reuters.com/article/us-newzealand-internet-dotcom...

I don't think El Chapo belongs in prison for drug-dealing though, I think he belongs in prison for murder, etc.

Has Kim Dotcom committed other crimes besides copyright infringement ones that the US plans to charge him with?

Sure, maybe he's a criminal and deserves punishment, but how about letting NZ decide that instead of the USA?

The internet has made things more complicated. You can commit crimes against the USA or its people without ever stepping foot inside the US. I don't know how you solve that. Dotcom has also been in court in NZ for the better part of a decade. It isn't like the laws in NZ or decisions my its people are irrelevant here.

Are you going to explain why? If somebody says that you can eat meat and still be a vegan, I want to know why.

What do you want me to explain? This is now the third time I have been asked practically the same question and I already responded to it the first time. He was basically running an organized crime racket. It is possible to think that is bad while also thinking the laws concerning one of the specific crimes at the heart of the matter is flawed.

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