Kim Dotcom’s marathon extradition battle will run for at least another year, despite a New Zealand court ruling that he can be sent to the United States, the Megaupload founder’s lawyer said Tuesday.
The flamboyant internet mogul is already planning to take Monday’s ruling to the Court of Appeal and his chief lawyer Ira Rothken said the legal saga was unlikely to end there.
“We think it’s going to take about a year or so for oral arguments in the Court of Appeal in Wellington,” he told Radio New Zealand.
“They have a discretion in how long they want to wait before they come back with their judgement.”
San Francisco-based Rothken said the case then appeared certain to end up in the Supreme Court — New Zealand’s last avenue of appeal — a process which could also take more than a year.
Dotcom’s fight against extradition has already rumbled on for more than five years, since armed police raided his mansion just outside Auckland in January 2012.
The FBI alleges Megaupload netted more than US$175 million in criminal proceeds and cost copyright owners more than US$500 million by offering pirated content.
Dotcom has denied any wrongdoing and accused US authorities of pursuing a vendetta against him on behalf of politically influential Hollywood studios.
In Monday’s decision, the High Court said Dotcom could not be extradited for copyright infringement because it is not a criminal offence in New Zealand.
But it said there was evidence that Megaupload’s actions constituted fraud, meaning Dotcom and his three co-accused were still eligible to be extradited.
Rothken said Dotcom would prevail because the US case had been built on allegations of copyright infringement, not fraud.
“We see that the entire case has been gutted… we do believe that the New Zealand appellate courts will find in our favour, it’s only logical,” he said.
Born Kim Schmitz in Kiel, northern Germany in 1974, Dotcom changed his name in 2005, around the same time he established Megaupload.
The website was an early example of cloud computing, allowing users to upload large files onto a server so others could easily download them without clogging up their email systems.
At its height in 2011, Megaupload claimed to have 50 million daily users and account for four percent of the world’s internet traffic.
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