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Digital Legal MegaUpload Timeline
MegaUpload lawyers push for quick decision on their bid to have the criminal case dismissed
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 22 June 2012
Lawyers working for MegaUpload have called on a US judge to rule next week on their previously reported bid to have the criminal case against the defunct file-transfer website dismissed.
As previously reported, the Mega lawyers reckon that the American authorities cannot pursue a criminal copyright infringement case against the MegaUpload company because it did not have an official base in the States, meaning no criminal summons can be formally served with the corporate entity. US officials were able to shut down the MegaUpload operation because most of its servers were based within America, but the company was incorporated in Hong Kong.
Reps for the US government have asked that a 29 Jun court hearing to consider the dismissal claim be postponed, because some key members of the prosecution team are unavailable that day. But Team Mega are not impressed. They told the judge that, in their opinion, the US government “should not need additional time to substantiate the basic premises of its prosecution, which has already laid waste to defendants’ business, deprived them of tens of millions of dollars in assets along with their ability to earn a living, and branded them as criminals whose liberty is confined”.
Even if the judge hearing the criminal case against MegaUpload was to side with the defence on this one – next week or in the near future – the charges made against the seven men who ran the company would still stand. However, the MegaUpload legal team hope that, if charges being made against the Mega company are dismissed, they can persuade the courts in New Zealand that the charges that have been specifically levelled against the four individual Mega executives living there – including founder Kim ‘Dotcom’ Schmitz – are not sufficiently serious enough to justify extradition to the States.
Dotcom, meanwhile, has returned to Twitter, mainly to plug his own music-making ventures, to confirm he is still working on his direct-to-fan platform MegaBox, and to reveal he recently met with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who has reportedly said he’s going to try and help all those former Mega customers, who lost access to their legitimate data when the file-transfer service was shut-down without warning, to retrieve their files.
