14 DAY TRIAL // The MegaUpload case isn't going well for the American government and the corporations behind it, or at least, it's not going as well as they might have expected. With Dotcom and his "co-conspirators'" extradition hearings pushed back to next year, the battle is being waged in the US as well.
For one, the prosecutors are trying to get around the fact that MegaUpload isn't a US company and, as such, can't be served with a lawsuit. The FBI initially claimed that MegaUpload was a "rogue" site, outside the reach of US justice, which is why they needed international cooperation to bring it down.
Now though, they're changing the tune to suit them better, now MegaUpload is a company with strong ties with the US, so "obviously" it can be tried there.
The prosecutors are claiming that MegaUpload had a lot of US users, which it did though that doesn't change anything, and that it used US-based hosting, which it did though that still doesn't change the fact that MegaUpload, the company, had no legal presence in the US.
But they're going further, the company had two American CEOs. The latest is none other than Swizz Beatz, a Grammy Award winner, married to none other than Alicia Keys.
He has refused any connection to the case and has not helped the government in any way. But the FBI kept away from him as well, careful to leave him and his name out as much as possible, to make it easier to portray MegaUpload as a criminal organization bent on making it rich off the backs of the poor American artists. That would have been a lot harder if the poor American artists were running the company.
But now that the weak evidence the attack on MegaUpload was based on is beginning to be a problem in court, the FBI has no alternative than to drag Swizz Beatz, aka Kasseem David Dean, into the whole mess. The prosecutors believe that since he is an US citizen, he can be served as a representative of MegaUpload.
One thing is for sure, a huge chunk of the MegaUpload case, on both sides of the Pacific, rely solely on the decisions of the courts involved. The New Zealand courts have so far been rather skeptical of the "evidence" presented and the methods employed in the raid. It remains to be seen whether the US courts will exercise the same level of circumspection.