Digital Legal MegaUpload Timeline

Dotcom says American VP instigated MegaUpload shutdown

By | Published on Thursday 5 July 2012

MegaUpload

MegaUpload founder Kim ‘Dotcom’ Schmitz, who declared on Twitter yesterday that “SOPA is dead, PIPA is dead, ACTA is dead, MEGA will return”, has accused American Vice-President Joe Biden of personally instigating the shutdown of his company, most likely at the request of the boss of the Motion Picture Association Of America, Chris Dodd, a friend of the VP.

As much previously reported, American officials raided the US server facilities where much of the MegaUpload empire was hosted in January, taking the service offline. American prosecutors are now trying to extradite seven executives linked to the MegaUpload company, who are accused of copyright infringement, money laundering and racketeering.

It’s in a new interview with TorrentFreak that Dotcom claims that Biden personally intervened with regards his company. Telling the tech site he’s known this for sometime but has held off until know to go public, Dotcom said: “I do know from a credible source that it was Joe Biden, the best friend of former Senator and MPAA boss Chris Dodd, who ordered his former lawyer and now state attorney, Neil MacBride, to take Mega down”.

The Mega man says a meeting took place in the US last June attended by Biden, Dodd and various studio heads, plus Mike Ellis of the Motion Picture Association Asia Pacific. Ellis previously worked for the Hong Kong Police Force, and is apparently an expert on extradition, both handy bits of knowledge since any American strike against MegaUpload was always going to require the extradition of non-US based Mega executive, and given that MegaUpload’s corporate HQ is in Hong Kong. Ellis then met with New Zealand’s Minister Of Justice Simon Power soon after, Dotcom says.

The Mega chief added: “At the appropriate time we will release what we know. The whole Mega case is quite the political thriller”.

The US’s application to have Dotcom extradited from New Zealand to the States is ongoing, despite a ruling in the New Zealand courts last week that a police raid on the MegaUpload founder’s home there in January was illegal, and despite efforts by Dotcom’s lawyers in America to have the whole case against him dismissed.



READ MORE ABOUT: |