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Digital Legal MegaUpload Timeline
MegaUpload prosecutors say they need more time to share evidence
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 6 June 2012
Lawyers representing the New Zealand authorities have said that it is “unrealistic” to expect prosecutors in the country to reveal all the evidence they and their US counterparts have amassed against MegaUpload within three weeks, because there is simply so much of it.
As previously reported, the legal team working for MegaUpload and its founder Kim ‘Dotcom’ Schmitz last week told a court in New Zealand that it was impossible for them to fight both the criminal charges against their clients, and efforts to extradite Dotcom et al to the US, because the American authorities, and the New Zealand officials working with them, had so far only revealed a snippet of the evidence they had against Team Mega. The judge sided with the MegaUpload attorneys, and ordered the prosecution to share all their evidence within three weeks.
But earlier this week representatives for the New Zealand authorities said the 21 day deadline was unrealistic, because the US feds had seized eighteen servers that used to form part of the MegaUpload epire, and there was so much content on them that making copies for the defence team would take more than three weeks. Doing it any quicker was “unrealistic”. Though MegaUpload’s rep at the hearing said he feared the US authorities would procrastinate as long as possible in handing over evidence, making it harder for him and his colleagues to prepare a defence. Judge Helen Winkelmann reserved her decision on the matter for the time being.
Dotcom and six other men are accused of copyright infringement, money laundering and racketeering in relation to their involvement with the MegaUpload enterprise, though none are currently in the US to face the charges directly.
The eighteen former Mega servers in the custody of the FBI were seemingly taken from one of the former cloud storage firm’s suppliers Cogent, and are separate to the now shut down ex-Mega servers owned by Carpathia Hosting which have been the subject of much debate in the US, as former customers, who lost access to their data when the MegaUpload service was turned off by the authorities in January without warning, fight through the courts to get their files back.
