14 DAY TRIAL // There's a new chapter in the never-ending story of Kim Dotcom vs. the US Government after the web mogul's request to get back his seized properties was denied.
Kim Dotcom, the man behind Megaupload, was raided back in 2012. The US government then seized millions of dollars in Dotcom's bank accounts, as well as multiple cars, jet skis, his mansion, luxury cars, TVs, expensive watches, and more. Dotcom, who is currently fighting against an extradition request from New Zealand to the United States, asked the courts to get the government to give his assets back.
Last week, however, the Justice Department filed a document telling the Supreme Court that it should uphold the federal appeals court decision which ruled against Dotcom back in August, using Dotcom's resistance to the extradition as its reasoning.
"Congress sought to bar the 'unseemly spectacle' of allowing an accused to absent himself deliberately in order to avoid prosecution in the United States while using United States courts to retrieve the proceeds of his crime," the file reads.
On the other hand, Dotcom's lawyers claim that since he has never even stepped foot on US soil, he cannot be labeled a fugitive, accusing the Justice Department of interpreting the Fugitive Disentitlement Doctrine in a way that suited its purpose.
No end in sight
The US considers the Megaupload case, which has been going in circles for the past five years, to be among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States. The prosecutors said the site facilitated copyright infringement of a massive scale by allowing people to share movies, music, TV shows, e-books, and software.
The US believes it has jurisdiction over Megaupload because many of its servers were located in the United States. In fact, there's still a bit of a conflict over who has the right to view the content on those servers too.
People have filed lawsuits against the US government, hoping to be able to get access to the files they had stored in their Megaupload accounts before the service was taken down, especially since many of them had plenty of original content there. Users fear that the data will soon be gone for good.