Kim Dotcom, roguish face of 2010s on-line piracy, will lastly be extradited to the US

Kim Dotcom, the Megaupload founder and hard-partying face of early 2010s on-line piracy, is lastly headed to the US. Reuters reports that New Zealand’s justice minister signed an extradition order on Thursday to finish the entrepreneur’s practically 13-year authorized battle, paving the best way for the German-born Dotcom to face charges from the US authorities.

“I thought-about all the info rigorously, and have determined that Mr Dotcom must be surrendered to the U.S. to face trial,” Goldsmith mentioned in an announcement. The choice got here greater than six years after a New Zealand court docket ruled Dotcom could be extradited to the US, paving the best way for appeals that culminated in at present’s resolution.

As soon as the thirteenth most visited website on-line, the file-hosting website Megaupload was a hotbed for pirated content material. In early 2012, American authorities charged Dotcom and 6 others with racketeering, copyright infringement, cash laundering and copyright distribution. The US indictment claimed Megaupload value copyright holders $500 million in damages whereas making $175 million from adverts and premium subscriptions.

The raid on Dotcom’s Auckland mansion was dramatic fare amongst 2012’s comparatively tame headlines. The New York Instances reported on the time that when he noticed the police, Dotcom barricaded himself inside, activating a number of digital locks and waited in a secure room. When officers lower their manner inside, they noticed Dotcom standing close to “a firearm that they mentioned appeared like a sawed-off shotgun.”

Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz) had a number of brushes with the legislation earlier than that. He not less than claimed to have spent three months in a Munich jail in 1994 for “breaking into Pentagon computer systems and observing real-time satellite tv for pc photographs of Saddam Hussein’s palaces.” Quickly after, he acquired a suspended two-year sentence for a rip-off involving stolen telephone card numbers.

In 2001, he was accused within the largest insider-trading case in German historical past. He reportedly fled Germany to flee these expenses, was captured in Thailand, extradited (this week isn’t his first go-round) and convicted in 2002. In some unspecified time in the future after that, he moved to New Zealand, holing up in an expensive mansion.

You may see that mansion — and a style of his larger-than-life persona — in his music video “Good Life.”

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith signed the extradition order on Thursday and adopted commonplace apply in giving Dotcom “a brief time frame to contemplate and take recommendation” on his resolution.

Dotcom, by no means one to mince phrases, posted a message on X that “the obedient US colony within the South Pacific simply determined to extradite me for what customers uploaded to Megaupload.”