Two men who helped run the once wildly popular pirating website Megaupload have each been sentenced by a New Zealand court to more than two years in prison. The sentencing of Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk ended an 11-year legal battle by the men to avoid extradition to the United States on more serious charges that included racketeering. The sentencing came after the men struck a deal last year with prosecutors from New Zealand and the U.S. Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, is continuing to fight the U.S. charges and threat of extradition. He has said he expects his former colleagues to testify against him as part of the deal they struck.

U.S. prosecutors say Megaupload raked in at least $175 million — mainly from people who used the site to illegally download songs, television shows and movies -— before the FBI shut it down in early 2012 and arrested Dotcom and other company officers.

  • @maynarkh@feddit.nlEnglish
    23•1 year ago

    I can’t actually find what these guys were actually guilty of. All media is sharing the same story that they pled guilty to something, and the charges “could have included racketeering if they were extradited to the US”, but they apparently weren’t.

    AFAIK the whole story was that they specifically started Megaupload in NZ because it was not a crime there, yet the FBI raided their place in a foreign country. If I was a Kiwi, I’d be up in arms about it.

    • BlueÆtherEnglish
      13•1 year ago

      we were at the time. Note that it has been 11 years and Kin Dotcom still hasn’t been extradited to the us

      • @maynarkh@feddit.nlEnglish
        5•1 year ago

        What does NZ charge him or these guys with? I mean if they broke NZ laws, it’s fine, I know how this piracy thing works, but at the time it seemed made up.

        • @Noonecanknowitsme@beehaw.orgEnglish
          3•1 year ago

          It looks like they were charged in the US. I didn’t see with what specifically but the US sentenced them to prison for about a year and they elected to do their prison sentence in NZ (which is allowing one of them to wait until the birth of their child before beginning their sentence). It looks like NZ’s role in this isn’t harmful (besides allowing foreign search of their home)

          • kwjEnglish
            5•1 year ago

            undefined> (besides allowing foreign search of their home)

            So it is harmful.

          • Deref
            3•1 year ago

            Even in the US there’s no law against hosting encrypted files. They could be liable if they knew a specific file was illegal/pirated and didn’t take it down but a recent SCOTUS case (think it was Twitter v Taamneh) set the precedent that general knowledge of illegal activity is not enough.

            • @Noonecanknowitsme@beehaw.org
              2•1 year ago

              Thank you for that reference! I did think it was a poor reasoning for US to say “you’re distributing pirated material” versus their response of “it’s the users who are distributing it”. I’ll look more into the SCOTUS case

            • Kaldo
              1•1 year ago

              I was always wondering why this isn’t an obvious “gotchya” for pirated content. Wouldn’t even a very simple encryption make it impossible to prove that the content being shared is copyrighted/illegal? After all, there could be anything in these bytes?

            • @AntennaRover
              1•1 year ago

              I don’t think the original MegaUpload site hosted encrypted files, at least not in a zero-knowledge way. They also encouraged users to do things like upload their entire music libraries and had a searchable database of them called Megabox. They weren’t just a file hosting provider, they were in many instances encouraging their users to upload pirated content and had all of the tools to see what was being uploaded and what was infringing.

    • Eggyhead
      6•1 year ago

      The crime of making rich people think they might be a little less rich than they could be.