During the raid on Kim Dotcom’s property, the NZ Police took countless computers and hard drives from his residence and offices, many of which were fully encrypted. However, there was a lot of data on those drives that the NZ Police had no right in sharing with the FBI or any US authorities. In fact, they had already shared copies of the drives’ encrypted data to the FBI, which by now has probably cracked the encryption without Kim Dotcom’s keys. Kim’s lawyers have been wrangling with the policy negotiating whether or not he would provide the encryption keys to them and under what circumstances.

According to a recent ruling, a judge has ruled that the NZ Police cannot provide the FBI with any of the keys that Kim Dotcom may provide them with in order to access the data on the hard drives. The problem is that all of these assets were effectively seized from Kim Dotcom’s residence and offices without any real evidence of wrong-doing and they still haven’t really provided much of a case against him. Kim Dotcom is still technically under house arrest but he hasn’t really been found guilty of any official charges because the Crown Prosecution has failed on many counts trying to include evidence that would later be thrown out. Realistically, most of what the New Zealand authorities have done to Kim Dotcom has been mostly unfounded and based upon murky charges levied by US authorities, which technically have no jurisdiction over New Zealand. Furthermore, they are still trying to have him extradited to the US where they would try to get him to stand trial, but the possibility that he will be extradited is hopefully low considering all of the mistakes the New Zealand authorities have made.

The justice that ruled against the NZ authorities sharing Dotcom’s keys with the FBI and other agencies ruled this partially because they had already provided the US authorities with harddrives and copies of data that they weren’t supposed to give them to begin with. This once again shows the New Zealand authorities’ incompetence as well as the likelihood of how unfounded the US authorities’ case was when they had initiated the raid on Dotcom’s property and Megaupload.

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The High Court of New Zealand has ruled that Kim Dotcom must have all of his assets seized by the New Zealand government returned to him immediately and that barring an appeal from the Crown Prosecution, all $17 million in assets will be returned to him, including his cars, helicopter and any cash seized on hand. Thankfully for Kim, he’s already successfully launched a replacement service for Megaupload called Mega as well as a music service called Baboom.

When the New Zealand goverment, in conjunction with the US and Hong Kong governments seized all of Megaupload’s assets illegally (without any due process) it slowly became clear that many of these governments were acting as agents of their respective copyright mafias, namely the MPAA and RIAA and their international affiliates. Upon further analysis and legal proceedings it was determined that the actions of the Crown Prosecution among many other governmental agencies had overstepped their constitutional bounds and acted beyond the scope of the law. As such, Kim Dotcom has been kept under house arrest with limited access to his personal funds in order to pay for the property and lawyers.

However, with today’s announcement he gets something like $6 million in vehicles back, $10 million from financial institutions and the rest in personal items from himself and his wife that were seized during the raid. This is going to be a huge blow to the Crown in New Zealand as the court is clearly on Kim Dotcom’s side and it will be interesting to see what the court rules in his extradition hearing. His extradition hearing is expected to be in the next few months and will likely determine if he is extradited to the United States where he could be tried in court for up to 20 years in jail. Even though, realistically, the US courts would find so much wrong with the way that he was arrested and the evidence against him gathered (and evidence he could use to defend himself also destroyed) that any self-respecting judge would just throw the whole case out of court and claim a mistrial.

The gross negligence that the US and New Zealand governments displayed during their takedown and seizure of Megaupload’s assets will serve as an example of how you don’t take down a file sharing service and expect to accomplish anything other than looking like a bunch of amateurs. There’s no doubt that Kim Dotcom is not the most innocent of people, but there’s also no doubt that the way that the New Zealand and United States governments handled this case should have resulted in people losing their jobs for overstepping the law and trying to ruin the lives of anyone involved with Mega. Not to mention all of the legitimate artists and business owners that probably lost millions of dollars worth of their work stored on Megaupload’s servers which have since been shut down and wiped clean.

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