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Former MegaUpload execs jailed in New Zealand
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 16 June 2023
The two former MegaUpload execs who reached a deal with US prosecutors last year to avoid extradition to America have been sentenced in New Zealand. They were both handed jail terms of two and half years.
Mathias Ortmann and Bram Van Der Kolk were among the execs arrested when the US authorities staged their dramatic shutdown of file-transfer and video-sharing platform MegaUpload all the way back in 2012. Alongside the company’s founder and frontman Kim Dotcom, they were accused of running a platform that encouraged and facilitated rampant copyright infringement.
The Americans wanted all the former execs to face criminal copyright charges in the US courts. That resulted in more than a decade of legal wrangling as US prosecutors and their counterparts in New Zealand – where the three men lived – pursued extradition proceedings. The NZ courts ruled that they could be extradited, though the extradition is still awaiting government approval.
In May last year, it was confirmed that Ortmann and Van Der Kolk had both reached a deal with prosecutors that would see them face charges in relation to their time running MegaUpload within New Zealand rather than the US.
As part of that deal they pleaded guilty to crimes that could have resulted in up to ten years of jail time, while also agreeing to help prosecutors in their ongoing case against Dotcom.
Setting out the case against the former MegaUpload execs, Detective Inspector Stuart Mills from the NZ police said: ”Megaupload was a global criminal enterprise estimated to have cost copyright holders more than half a billion dollars”.
“As one of the largest copyright fraud schemes ever seen”, he went on, “MegaUpload operations involved the deliberate and systematic infringement of copyrighted material for financial gain. It exploited the work of artists, programmers and entrepreneurs as well as the organisations and corporations that represented them”.
According to the NZ Herald, judge Sally Fitzgerald told Ortmann and Van Der Kolk that she had also received statements from various parties setting out the impact of MegaUpload on copyright-owning businesses.
That included statements from the Recording Industry Association Of America and the Motion Picture Association Of America, but also people like a New Zealand-based software developer whose sales were hit by the unlicensed distribution of his product via the MegaUpload site.
Putting an even higher price tag than the police on losses MegaUpload contributed to, the RIAA estimated that its members lost $5.3 billion in the years that Megaupload was operating. Meanwhile, the developer from the NZ city of Timaru had to take other jobs to make a living such was the drop in sales of his software. Both said that their attempts to get MegaUpload to block the copyright-infringing content on its platform were unsuccessful.
Based on the specific crimes Ortmann and Van Der Kolk pleaded guilty to, Fitzgerald confirmed she could jail each of the two men for around ten years.
However, she said that – due to their guilty pleas and willingness to help prosecutors with the ongoing case against Dotcom – she would reduce the jail terms to two years seven months for Ortmann and two years six months for Van Der Kolk.
Their lawyer had been pushing for the two men to serve their time under house arrest, but the judge declined that request. She did, however, delay the start of the sentences so that the two men can deal with family matters before actually going to prison.
Needless to say, Dotcom responded to the latest developments in the long-running MegaUpload saga by again disputing the allegations that have been made against his old business.
His former colleagues, he insisted, pleaded guilty not because they were actually guilty, but to bring to an end more than ten years of legal wrangling which could ultimately have resulted in 185 years of jail time in the US.
“My legal team says that my co-defendants in the MegaUpload case are eligible for parole after ten months and will likely get parole as part of the deal they made with the US government”, he tweeted. “They will serve less than a year instead of the 185 years we were charged with. Good for them”.
“That’s why my former partners took the deal”, he later added. “Not because they actually believe that they are criminals. They are not. But they were tired of fighting and gave up in exchange for a 98.5% discount of the 185 years we were charged with. I don’t blame them. They have been through hell”.
So there you go. One strand of the long-running MegaUpload story comes to an end. Though the always more lively Dotcom strand continues. And now I’ve got the MegaUpload Song stuck in my head again.
