Megaupload Bombshell: Judge Rules Police Anti-Piracy Raids Illegal
By Juha Saarinen
June 28, 2012

The American government’s bid to extradite copyright infringement king Kim Dotcom to the United States was dealt a body blow Thursday, when a New Zealand High Court judge ruled that the raids on Doctom’s home earlier this year were “illegal.” The decision may doom the entire prosecution of the founder of the file-sharing site Megaupload; New Zealand authorities are appealing.

Justice Helen Winkelmann says that warrants for the raids “fell well short of” describing the offenses they were meant to relate. According to Justice Winkelmann, words such as “breach of copyright” used in the warrants do not provide details of the alleged offense and therefore, the warrants do not comply with New Zealand law.

Further undermining the prosecution’s case, Justice Winkelmann also ruled that the FBI’s act of sending clones of Dotcom’s hard drives to the U.S. was also unlawful.

The images were sent to the United States despite an agreement with Dotcom’s lawyers that it wouldn’t happen before a court hearing on whether or not it was permissible had taken place.

Justice Winkelmann has ordered the FBI to start copying the cloned images in preparation of a potential return to Dotcom. The data on the cloned hard drives amounts to 150 terabytes, and came from 135 computers seized when police conducted an armed dawn raid on his rented home in Coatesville, north of New Zealand’s largest city Auckland.

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