Kim Dotcom to be extradited to the US

Kim Dotcom, the former owner of hugely popular file sharing website Megaupload , has been informed that he is to be extradited to the US, where he is due to face charges for a range of offenses including copyright infringement, money laundering, and racketeering. As reported in Stuff, New Zealand Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has signed an extradition order for Kim Dotcom to be deported to the US.

The tech entrepreneur is originally from Germany, but has been living in New Zealand since 2010, and fighting extradition since the United States Department of Justice seized the Megaupload file sharing website and filed charges against him in 2012. The New Zealand government has finally agreed to the extradition, with Goldsmith stating that he has “decided that Mr Dotcom should be surrendered to the US to face trial.”

What was Megaupload and why was it shut down?

The file sharing site was popular for pirated content

Megaupload was a file sharing site that ran from 2005 until 2012, when it was seized by the United States Department of Justice. As the name suggests, the site allowed anyone to upload files which could be made publicly available for anyone else to download. There are plenty of legitimate uses for a service of this kind, but unsurprisingly, the site soon became one of the most popular sites for uploading and downloading pirated content.

According to the Megaupload indictment, the site was at one point estimated to be the 13th most frequently visited site on the internet, with a total of more than a billion visits, and over 180 million registered users. At its peak, it was seeing an average of 50 million daily visits and made up around 4% of total internet traffic. All of which inevitably made Kim Dotcom a lot of money through subscriptions and advertising. The case against Kim Dotcom claims that the estimated harm to copyright holders was well over half a billion dollars.

The rise of affordable streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix significantly reduced the popularity of online piracy, by making it possible to access legitimate content easily and at a reasonable price. Piracy is still a thing, and may even grow in popularity again as companies such as Netflix and Disney+ continue to raise prices and clamp down on account sharing, but it’s nowhere near the levels that it reached during the heyday of Megaupload and RapidShare.

It’s unlikely to be any time soon

With the US pressing charges against Kim Dotcom in 2012, it has already taken 12 years to reach the point where an extradition order for him to face trial in the US has finally been signed. However, it’s highly likely that things will continue to drag out a little longer.

Kim Dotcom is within his rights to appeal the decision to extradite him to the US, and it should come as no surprise that it seems like that is exactly what he plans to do.

The tech millionaire has already taken to X (formerly Twitter) to make it clear that he has no intention of going quietly. In two posts, Dotcom states that he has a plan, and that he loves New Zealand and isn’t leaving.

An appeal is unlikely to be a quick process, so this story is likely to continue to drag out for a little while yet. Dotcom has always maintained that he should not be held responsible for the content that users chose to upload to Megaupload, but the United States Department of Justice claims that not only were Megaupload employees aware that the site was being used to host infringing copies of copyright content, but that some of those same employees used the site to upload copyrighted works themselves.

It remains to be seen whether this attempt to extradite Kim Dotcom to the US will be successful, but more than a decade after the plug was pulled on Megaupload, the story still rumbles on.