Why you should care about the Kafkaesque abomination that is the legal case against Kim Dotcom
And the madness that is this Kafkaesque case against Kim Dotcom continues, this time the Court rules that the Police had no cause to have arrested Kim on the charges of Copyright infringement, but have given our legal sovereignty over to the United States by instead finding trumped up fraud charges as the excuse to trigger extradition.
David Fisher recaps the terrible level of incompetence and acquiescence to America that John Key locked us into…
When our elite anti-terrorist police stormed the Coatesville mansion to make arrests, the warrant they issued to Dotcom cited exactly the section of the Copyright Act which the court now says in not an extraditable offence.
It’s worth considering this in context with what else happened at the time.
There were also issues with the restraining order for Dotcom’s assets. It was the first major blunder in a case which would see others.
There were innumerable issues with the search warrant – it didn’t go through the right approval channels and contained dodgy intelligence which overstated the risk.
There was also the spying failure where it turned out the Government Communications Security Bureau – partner agency to the National Security Agency – was following a rulebook written on a misunderstanding of its own law.
And so how long was it known that it might not be possible to extradite Dotcom for alleged criminal violation of the Copyright Act?
The court hearings started to feature the word “fraud” some time after the arrest. It was at least six months and possibly a year. Prior to that, all the references were about “criminal copyright”.
Just how many errors have there been in the Dotcom case? The only thorough rinse-through of any of the errors seems to the review of the GCSB by then-Cabinet Secretary Rebecca Kitteridge.
The reason it matters is that we’re still a few years away from a conclusion to this case.
…I appreciate NZers have bought into the right wing John Key narrative that Kim Dotcom is some Bond Villain who deserves to be thrown to the Americans. The unbelievable way New Zealanders and the mainstream media framed the Moment of Truth as a giant waste of time because Kim didn’t prove Key knew about him before he claimed shows the juvenile nature of our immaturity as a society.
The Moment of Truth had Assange, Greenwald and Edward Snowden prove without a shadow of a doubt that John Key had lied through his teeth about mass surveillance. It showed the NSA and CIA have staff here, it showed they planned to spike the sea cable and steal data directly from that feed and it showed that our GCSB went and met with the NSA to assure them the law Key had just pushed through allowed for mass surveillance despite Key telling the NZ public that it didn’t.
But what did NZ focus on? Kim not proving Key knew he existed before he claimed to have known.
This is us as a country…
So why should you care about this legal case? There are 2 reasons why you as a NZer should care about the Kim Dotcom case.
The first is the unbelievable injustice of the entire fiasco. Kim was illegally spied upon by the GCSB, he was set up by NZ immigration services so that he would enter the country in the first place, our security apparatus slavishly followed US agencies with a live feed to the NSA during the raid, the entire event was politically motivated after Corporate Hollywood threatened to with-hold donations to Obama’s Presidential bid if they didn’t make a symbolic gesture against internet piracy, and the case against him is so weak it looks like incredible over reach by our authorities and US authorities…
The A-list conspiracy: Did Hollywood tell Obama to take down internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom?
One of Dotcom’s lawyers, Robert Amsterdam, told The Independent that the criminal case against his client, which alleges that Dotcom used Megaupload as a front for a criminal enterprise that willingly shared and profited from millions of dollars’ worth of copyrighted material, is based on erroneous use of civil law and is rooted in the relationship between the upper reaches of the Democratic party and the film-making industry.
In particular, Amsterdam cites the friendship between Vice President Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and a former Senator.
According to Amsterdam and his co-counsel, the US Department of Justice is going to great lengths to prosecute, and thus appease the Hollywood lobby, using racketeering laws to bolster a weak case built on non-existent civil theories of ‘secondary copyright infringement’.
“Here you have, if you excuse me, computer geeks, and they’re being treated as if they’re the heads of the Gambino crime family,” he says.
Expanding on a white paper recently released via Dotcom’s website, Amsterdam points out that the raid on Dotcom’s mansion came on the same day as the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill designed to tackle online piracy, was shelved in US Congress after outcry from online giants such as Google and Facebook, which claimed it would curb online freedoms.
The day before, Dodd made comments implying that the MPAA would stop supporting President Obama if something was not done to tackle copyright infringement.
Dodd, a man Biden has described as one of his best friends, had told FOX News: “Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a cheque for you when you think your job is at risk, and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.”
For Hollywood, a considerable amount of money is certainly at stake. The MPAA estimates that online piracy costs the US film industry around $20.5bn per year. Though critics say the true figure is in the hundreds of millions, it is still a significant loss for an industry that is already facing other funding pressures after the 2008 financial crisis.
Amsterdam argues that shutting down Megaupload, and the raid on Dotcom, was a “Plan B” to pushing through SOPA.
“I think, when the President of the Motion Picture Association, on 19 January says that if people basically don’t help him out, he’s not writing any cheques, and then on the 20 January [authorities] attack my client… and throw him in jail, there’s at least an inference there that at least requires an explanation.”
Amsterdam also points to White House logs, which show President Obama hosted Chris Dodd for a two-and-a-half hour private lunch meeting in the Oval Office on 9 December 2011, six weeks before the raid.
Though some would call this conspiratorial, and sceptics will point to the many other issues a former Senator and Hollywood bigwig would discuss at the White House, Amsterdam argues that Megaupload and its founder are likely to have cropped up.
“Starting off from all of the legal grounds that exist and moving to the political nature of the attack [we must ask] ‘was this discussed in the White House?’ and ‘who said what to whom?’,” he says.
Hollywood’s long-standing financial support for the Democrats is no secret. Amsterdam describes the relationship thus: “The MPAA is to the Democrats what the NRA is to the Republicans.”
One glitzy, celebrity-packed dinner organised by George Clooney raised $15m for Obama’s re-election campaign last year.
…this case has been an abomination of legal process, jurisdiction and injustice. You might not like Kim Dotcom, but the manner in which his rights have been breached and 70 odd armed paramilitary cops broke into his home and terrorised him and his family is as unacceptable as the abuses of power used in court against him.
This is not what our justice system should be used for, we are not a puppet for US interests, we should be a sovereign state with our own laws and judicial system that is beyond influence by America and their corporate overlords.
I’ll appreciate if this is all news to you, because this is the current standard of political journalism in NZ…
…why tomato sauce doesn’t pour properly. That’s the standard of our journalism.
But the injustice of this case may not move you. You may have bought into the media hype of Dotcom as a Bond Villain and enjoyed his failure at the ballot box. You may have decided that despite Assange, Snowden and Greenwald proving at the Moment of Truth that John Key lied to us about mass surveillance, that Kim fell short of what he promised and he got his just desserts.
If you fall into that category then the possibility of being sued if this goes south may concern you…
New twist in Kim Dotcom case
The managers of the nation’s finances were kept at arm’s length when the Kim Dotcom case required Kiwi taxpayers to underwrite a potential future legal suit from the internet entrepreneur, a new document shows.
Instead, then-police commissioner Peter Marshall signed the “undertaking in respect to costs and damages” – the agreement which would allow Dotcom to sue New Zealand if it emerged the FBI case against him was unfair and unfounded.
It was the first time that the Crown was required to give an “undertaking” in a case where the property of someone facing charges was seized and was because the charges were brought by a foreign agency.
The need to provide an “undertaking of liability” emerged after police seized the tycoon’s cash and property without notice. The law required Dotcom have the chance to challenge the seizure and be given formal notice of his right to sue the Crown.
The need to provide an undertaking in March and April 2012 surprised the Crown and the Herald sought details of the debate and consideration over the risk to which NZ was exposed through the Official Information Act in July 2012. Treasury refused to supply the information sought so the Ombudsman was called on to investigate.
After three years of deliberation, Chief Ombudsman Dame Beverley Wakeham found there was a “public interest” which would be met by releasing a summary, which Treasury sent to the Herald this month.
The summary showed there were meetings “to discuss the case and how to inform ministers” were held Crown Law, police, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Justice and Treasury.
On March 22 2012 Finance minister Bill English was told he “did not have a role in approving or signing off this kind of undertaking”. Instead, it was the Commissioner of Police’s role under the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act.
While Mr English was kept briefed – including a briefing from Mr Marshall and Attorney General Chris Finlayson – there was no process established through which he was able to be formally involved in the undertaking.
Under the Public Finance Act, Mr English is responsible for matters which might impact on Crown accounts. Dotcom has claimed the loss of Megaupload cost him more than $2 billion although others have argued the impact is far less.
The summary provided to the Herald said there had been a review of the mutual legal assistance framework of which Treasury was a part. It “intended to use the forum to recommend the establishment of a consultation process and set out criteria for issuing undertakings”.
The requirement to give an undertaking to the court to meet any damages was a factor which put Sony off joining a civil case seeking to claim Dotcom’s assets, emailed hacked and released last year revealed. Sony’s top copyright lawyer, Aimee Wolfson, said it was “not at all unimaginable” Dotcom would avoid extradition or even successfully defend himself in the United States.
The studio is not a participant in a case in NZ courts with discussion in the emails showing potential exposure to a legal suit from Dotcom concerning executives.
The risk to which New Zealand is exposed was underscored by a legal opinion released today from Harvard University’s professor of law Lawrence Lessig, one of the world’s leading experts on copyright law. He said the FBI charges would not stand up in US courts and there was no basis in law for Dotcom to be extradited.
…let’s re-read that again. Sony decided not to sign up to the case against Dotcom because they believed there was a chance he would get off these trumped up charges and in turn sue everyone involved in taking him down to the tune of $2billion???
And we had to sign up to this?
So how much exactly are we on the hook for here? If you don’t care that he has been unjustly dealt with and his rights breached, you may be in for one hell of a shock if he wins and we are left paying for this politically motivated prosecution.
To date this case so that John Key could get a round of golf with Obama has cost NZ $30million, it’s going to cost another $20million and if Kim wins, he will have damages in the billions to claim against NZ.
Still laughing sleepy hobbits? Perhaps the majority of NZ needs to stop sniggering and start asking some serious fucking questions here because if the Supreme Court refuses to allow America to declare they have jurisdiction in cyber space, we are on the hook for a damages case the likes we’ve never seen before.
+100 Great Post!…says it all…a fiasco, a setup and a miscarriage of justice.
Where is the Labour Party on this?…and Mana?….and NZF?…and the Greens?
It’s all morally bankrupt
Winston has asked for an enquiry.
http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/news/politics/peters-demands-dotcom-inquiry/
Well said. The case is a fiasco and the police should not be signing away billions of dollars in liability that NZ tax payers need to come up with, when Sony’s own Lawyers advised them not to go ahead as (and the NZ courts have just proved) there is no criminal copywrite case to answer!
Viacom has already sued You Tube over the same allegations and lost in the US well before this case was trumped up in NZ. Video sharing sites are legal!
To illegally enter and then have 70 cops searching a house (after seeing too many movies and arriving via helicopter!) and then months later try to claim some sort of criminal activity that was never part of the original search doesn’t sound too legal to me!
Maybe it’s Joyce’s new ‘pretty legal’ justice system coming into play? With NZ government turning the courts into puppets and a Kangaroo court?
We have had Arthur Allen Thomas, we have the Ahmed Zaoui, we have had the Teina Pora’ case and so forth.
The take home for police, is that evidence MUST be there. The NZ police should not rely on foreign intelligence based on a few people’s opinions in most cases (Ahmed Zaoui) or just make the case as they go along because their government tells them to do it.
The NZ government were set up to do this show case that is falling apart on copywrite grounds that had already been proven in the US to be perfectly legal.
The Natz don’t care but the NZ tax payers should! This is a worse fuck up because someone has lost billions in revenue, been harassed for years and makes our police and the FBI look like Keystone cops.
A deal should be struck to get NZ taxpayers off the hook.
this whole story makes me angry and shows how the gnats have pandered to the USA we the tax payers are paying for this circus and it is making a mockery of our judicial system
And as for any money laundering charges, John Key and his own unregistered lawyer are setting up zero tax havens with no real disclosure rules to attract real criminals and launderers in NZ. Those people probably make their money from real crimes like drugs, people trafficking, environmental destruction like palm oil, and stealing government money. But that’s ok on Planet Key.
Let’s take down the NZ resident who sets up a video file share site in the new economy. Because it threatens profits of some friends of friends who make movies.
Hollywood doesn’t control the Internet and will never get the power to do so, thank goodness or take over our police to do their enforcement.
Others like You Tube are already there. And if Hollywood had been smart they would have set up their own file site or invested into Lightbox or Netflicks sites if they haven’t already done so.
Hollywood has become the desperate dinosaur clinging onto the old way of doing things and trying to litigate like Tobacco to keep profits rolling in. At least with Tobacco though, they have the decency to pay their own lawyers from their own pocket and not get some tiny country to do so for them, like Hollywood.
There is something called change and something called technology and increasingly people are not interested in sitting in a movie theatre or getting their entertainment via someone like ex Weldon who serves up crap every day on TV.
Dotcom is as guilty of money laundering as Tim Cook, and the rest of Hollywood and theUS IT crowd. And probably less guilty than John Key himself of fraud – just based on the blind trusts and asset sales alone!
It’s a politically motivated prosecution from start to finish and I don’t think we are quite ready in NZ to be the country to become that.
Wow! One of Martyn’s best posts yet. Brilliantly summarised.
Laid out bare as it is now, with the latest court ruling, the Kim Dotcom case exposes this government for the corrupt fraudulent pigswill it really is.
Dotcom was deliberately set up by the Key administration as a favour to the US. In granting the Dotcom family NZ permanent resident status, Key collaborated willingly with the MPPA to hand KDc over to US authorities on a silver platter! For what I ask? No doubt to improve his own standing with the powers that be in the US! In other words Kim Dotcom (and his family) unbeknowingly became a victim of treachery, courtesy of traitor then PM John Key’s devotion to serving his US masters, regardless of the consequences suffered by NZ residents. Gives me reason to believe this National government would not hesitate to sell any one of us out, if it meant personal gain on its part!
Now as this case begins to unravel in Kim Dotcom’s favour, as Martyn states, NZ taxpayers could well stand to be the losers, having to foot a very hefty payout to Mr Dotcom and rightfully so, considering what Key’s deception has cost Dotcom, emotionally, financially and
otherwise.
Be interesting to see what repercussions Key & Co will be made to endure once this case blows its lid in Dotcom’s favour.
One of the legs of the argument that provides a sense that Hollywood has some kind of grievance on the issue is the patently false presumption that people who watch material online would buy it at full price from Hollywood. Often people download movies that are not locally screened, and, in many parts of the world, US cinema prices would not be sustainable. Although some forms of piracy hit smaller producers, the word of mouth promotion of popularly downloaded works contributes to their success and Hollywood returns. The whole approach has been dog-in-the-manger. Had Hollywood half the brains of a healthy lettuce they’d’ve had KDC making them a better version of Netflix several years early.
The whole affair has been vexacious from start to finish and NZ should by now be acting to mitigate the damages for which our fucking stupid government have made us liable.
And the reality is that with increasingly inequality, $30 in NZ for a couple to go to the cinema is too much when the minimum wage is so low and people are on zero hour contracts and have to constantly work.
Do many people really have the time, energy, let alone funds to go to a set viewing, pay to drive or bus there etc, queue and then have someone crunching away next to you and pay a fortune for overpriced snacks?
Much of Hollywood money now is actually made from merchandising anyway. So in the Viacom case they actually found that Viacom were uploading the video’s themselves onto the file sharing sites like You Tube, to drive business along and then they tried to sue them for lost profits!!!
Thanks for pointing this out Stuart. The estimates of “lost sales” by the media cartels are about as reliable as cop estimates of the street value of cannabis crops, which weigh the whole plant (including leaves, stems, and root ball) and multiply that weight by the street price of an ounce of dried buds. There have been a multitude of economic studies by researchers not paid by the media cartels, concluding that non-commercial file-sharing either has no effect on media sales, or increases them. Just a few examples:
2004: http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf
2010: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08997764.2012.700974?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=hmec20
2012: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1501&context=cmc_theses
2013: http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/documents/MPP/LSE-MPP-Policy-Brief-9-Copyright-and-Creation.pdf
2016: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167624516301226
Exelent post martyn,
Our erosion of our civil rights is manifest in the evil these toxic corporate “greedies” do to us all.
They must be culled before they totally enslave us all in their economic slavery plans they are devising against us all.
The US Supreme Court is about to decide a case whether the US Constitution applies to foreigners. If 230 years of it does not is suddenly thrown out, you NZers are going to be possibly sets to Americans. The US is getting weirder and more perverse as a culture. The people pushed back against this hegemony by electing Trump. But courts are being used as end runs around freedom of the people. You should fight for Dot on even if he is a fat German. The US helped to defeat the Germans. Now the US has morphed into a withering cultural disease. Fight this disease.
The disease is called American Imperialism.
The disease is American Imperialism.
Great article Martyn. The whole can of worms was initiated by Obama’s Government and John Key’s government trying to suck up to them. Exactly why NZ should once again have an independent foreign policy. With friends like that who needs enemies
The whole darn senario is getting more mind boggling by the day.
The New Zealand tax payer is paying the price and if Dot com wins and we get sued then we should in turn sue the MPPA for all costs including all the court cases and investigation costs and any monies we pay KIT DOT COM.
US extra-territorial reach into New Zealand goes even further. The US government passed an amendment to a highway bill in2010 that was meant to partly cover the costs. This amendment, FATCA, foreign account tax compliance act, was forced on over 160 governments through IGAs or inter governmental agreements (NZ in June 2014). If a foreign bank doesn’t identify and report the bank details of persons having a connection to the US to Inland Revenue and then to US IRS, then the US will withhold 30% of all money from that bank trading in US dollars. The compliance cost of this so far is $120 mil (Wikipedia). As a dual citizen of NZ and US, my bank balances must be reported to the US, also must file annual US taxes, and detail credit cards, bank acct, pensions, Kiwisaver to the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, at threat of US $10k fine per account per year for failing to report. Fortunately no assets in US.
The issue for Justice Gilbert to consider, as it was for Justice Asher on 10 February 5 years ago, is can he issue a warrant to arrest these 4 men? How would it be worded? Far more important than 3000 odd pages of submissions beating around the bush. He cannot and should recall the matter and release them from the so-called bail
Don’t think only stupid Americans are affected, the tentacles of our oligarchs are far reaching.
Highly recommend everyone here watch Adam Curtis’ latest doco “HyperNormalisation”, which attempts to explain the world we currently live by examining how politicians shape our perceptions etc. Really great stuff that will likely change how you see/interpret things that are currently happening.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6156350/
John Campbell was like a dog with a bone on this. The rest of the media was useless
It was the first time I really saw John Key lying through his teeth.
Campbell made all the connections with the deal NZ was forging with Hollywood re:Lord of the Rings, Keys visit to Hollywood chiefs and Obama, the raid and Key’s professed ignorance of a billionaire in his own electorate. Key brushed it all off as co incidence.
And we were all encouraged to hate Dotcom because he was fat, German and rich
Thank you Martyn….I was not in NZ when this all occurred and I remember thinking, extradition for Copyright? Really? On what planet….JK was got at. No doubt about it. Bit the same as Lange was got at by the French over the Rainbow Warrior …but this was different. In this case, they had a willing buyer as Key only relates to money. There is nothing else on his radar. Just follow Homeland. Nothing fictional about that.