14 DAY TRIAL // MegaUpload won a significant victory in court as the judge granted the request for all evidence against MegaUpload and its employees to be released by the US prosecutors, not just the evidence held by the police in New Zealand, where the extradition case is being heard.
The judge has asked for all evidence against the accused to be retrieved and presented to the defense in 21 days.
This victory is very important since it enables MegaUpload's Kim Dotcom and the rest of the accused to mount a better defense, since they know what the authorities have on them.
Only some of the evidence was released when Dotcom was first arrested by New Zealand police.
The US prosecutors are asking for Dotcom and other MegaUpload employees to be extradited to the states to be charged with criminal copyright infringement, money laundering, racketeering and others.
The extradition hearing is not scheduled until August, but Dotcom's lawyers successfully asked for all evidence to be released prior to the hearing.
The judge also had some interesting comments indicating that the US will have to work harder than they might have expected to have the men extradited.
One of the things he noted was that, even though Dotcom was accused of several serious crimes, they all depended on the prosecutors being able to prove that criminal copyright infringement took place. Without this, there can be no talk of money laundering and so on. And there can be no talk of extradition for civil copyright charges.
"There is a complex factual matrix and justiciable issues are complicated by the fact that the United States is attempting to utilize concepts from the civil copyright context as a basis for the application of criminal copyright liability which necessitates a consideration of principles such as the dual use of technology or what they described as significant non-infringing use," the judge wrote in his order.
"The existence of criminal copyright charges is a keystone to providing the unlawful conduct element of the racketeering, money laundering and wire fraud charges," he added.