TorrentFreak

In 2010, New Zealand’s Security Intelligence Service were carrying out special checks on Kim Dotcom as part of his application to become an NZ resident. They turned up something unexpected. The FBI were investigating the Megaupload founder as part of a huge alleged criminal conspiracy. But mysteriously Dotcom was welcomed into New Zealand with open arms, something he now fears was a trap to make him more accessible to the United States.

Kim Dotcom and his associates have chalked up another win in their New Zealand extradition battle. Last year High Court judge Justice Helen Winkelmann gave Dotcom permission to sue GCSB, the Kiwi spy agency, for illegally spying on him on behalf of the FBI. The ruling was challenged by the Attorney-General but today the Court of Appeal announced that compensation can indeed be sought from GCSB. The downside is that access to evidence will again be restricted.

Despite aggressive legal action in the United States, Kim Dotcom and his associates still have big dreams for their Mega machine. Eyeing an IPO within the next 18 months, the company is currently advertising for a New Zealand-based finance guru to join the team as the operation’s Chief Financial Officer. But alongside dreams of a stock exchange listing runs an extradition battle, which today sees the start of a two day secret session that not even Dotcom’s lawyers are permitted to attend.

Kim Dotcom and his associates have lost a key battle in their extradition fight against the United States. On two earlier occasions, including once in the High Court, Dotcom’s legal team successfully argued they were entitled to examine mountains of evidence held by U.S. authorities. But those rulings were overturned this morning when the Court of Appeal said that the U.S. would be allowed to present a summary case after all. Dotcom says he’ll take an appeal to the Supreme Court.

More than a year after Megaupload was shutdown by the feds the site still has millions of visitors every month. Even without content the defunct file-hosting site is among the top 2,500 most-visited websites on the Internet, and only sightly behind Kim Dotcom’s new Mega. The baffling statistics show once again how enormous the site was.

In a bogus DMCA request Warner Bros. has asked Google to remove several links to Kim Dotcom’s cloud hosting service Mega. Not only did the movie studio send in the wrong URLs, they also failed to note that Mega download links aren’t indexed by Google to begin with. Adding to the controversy, Warner Bros does not appear to have sent Mega a direct takedown request for the infringing content in question.

Kim Dotcom has admitted that Mega is behind the shut down of the French-based indexing site Search-Mega.me. Mega’s team decided to take action because the site didn’t have a takedown policy, which offended some copyright holders. Dotcom stresses that Mega search engines will have to play by the rules in future. Filestube, the largest Mega search engine on the Internet, is an example of a well behaved service.