Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

The case before the New Zealand courts is ONLY if there is if there is cause for extradition. It's not the trial of his guilt or innocence on the charges. While I think he should have access to the files against him, those files will be disclosed if he faces trial in the US under discovery rules. However, the extradition case is more like a grand jury proceeding, deciding only if there is enough evidence to proceed, or in this case, extradite. Dotcom having access to all of the evidence against him has no influence on the decision to extradite.

If there is a complaint about the extradition process itself, there's nothing he can do about it as those rules are established by the Extradition Treaty. If he were worried about extradition, it would have been smart to locate himself in a non-extraditing country, or better yet, not building a company that facilitated massive-scale piracy. I know that all of MegaUpload traffic wasn't criminal, but I also know that Dotcom certainly wasn't ignorant of what was being trafficked across his servers, in fact he profited from it immensely.

But, this issue is one for the courts, and not just the ones in the US: his arrest was at the behest of Hong Kong, the Netherlands, the UK, the US, Germany and Canada.

He has a long criminal history relating to trafficking credit card numbers, insider trading and embezzlement. It's entirely logical that his arrest was completely warranted given the evidence and his history.

He isn't Kevin Mitnick, that's for sure.

Given that both sides are entering arguments, and that a failure to compromise is going to delay the extradition process, It seems likely that the legal implications of the treaty and intricacies of the extradition process are far more complex than you describe. If they were not, the requests by the defense would have been thrown out already.

Furthermore, considering the high quality council retained by Mr Dotcom, it would seem doubtful that they are missing something that an armchair analyst is able to discover and present in an online forum.

I don't think briandear was suggesting that he discovered something that Kim Dotcom or his council missed. I'm sure they understand what's going on... but much of the commentary about this case seems to be based on the misunderstanding that Kim Dotcom's guilt or innocence is currently being evaluated by the court.

It is being evaluated, just with vary low standards. If he could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the vary idea he commit-ed the crime was ludicrous then he could avoid extraction. If for example that he could demonstrate that 99.5% of the files on his site larger than 50mb where home movies then the primary use was not large scale copy-write infringement of movies.

If the document they're presenting is anything like as cherry-picked as the original indictment, I strongly suspect that the reason they're so insistent on only letting him have the cherry-picked version is that they're lying about the evidence that they have against him. For instance, they picked out long lists of payout amounts and descriptions of copyrighted content as evidence of intent to pay uploaders money for copyright infringing content. Based both on what I'd heard about their attitudes at the time and on a reference to Megaupload's policy of not paying copyright infringers that the prosecutor accidentally let into the indictment, I reckon that the lists were almost certainly being used to avoid paying money for copyright infringing content and that a full copy of the e-mails would reveal that the FBI are lying through their teeth.

Dotcom's past crimes are not relevant. His past actions, or inactions, have no bearing on the crimes he is now being accused of.

The judge in the extradition case said in May that Dotcom should have access to the FBI's information. Unless/until a court says otherwise, the FBI will need to hand over what they've got. Can a 44 page document accurately summarize 22 million emails? I doubt it.

"Dotcom having access to all of the evidence against him has no influence on the decision to extradite."

Then why not send him the files? It's not unduly burdensome. It's already all in electronic form. Maybe they do not want to enable him to start preparing his case?

There's little doubt he's guilty of infringement and he will suffer a punishment. What's at issue is whether he's being treated fairly, from a procedural standpoint. Why does that matter? Because the whole reason you're going after him with such force is to scare others who are doing the same thing - Megaupload is one of many similar sites. You're trying to deter others by setting an example. But you don't want to make him a martyr. You don't want to make him a hero by making the entertainment industry look even more crooked than the people running file lockers.

The entertainment industry already looks more crooked than people running file lockers. Fucking it up for everyone so that they can protect their failing business? Check. Abusing power to achieve that goal? Check. Looks pretty crooked to me.

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