Dotcom search warrants ruled illegal
Found on Sydney Morning Herald on Thursday, 28 June 2012
A New Zealand High Court judge has ruled that police search warrants used to seize property from Megaupload's founder Kim Dotcom were illegal.
Kim Dotcom was arrested in January when the FBI shut down his fire-sharing website aming claims it had cost copyright holders more than $US500 million in lost revenue from pirated films and other content.
She said that police without a valid warrant were trespassing and exceeded what they were lawfully authorised to do.
Still, the MPAA/RIAA has achieved what it wanted: with the help of the FBI, it shut down his entire business. Not to mention that the FBI also stole his private data by making copies of his harddrives and secretly sneaking them out and to the US. It's pretty amazing what the entertainment industry can start while at the same time patent trolls cost $29 billion, and not just $500 million (a number which is only based on their assumptions of course and with no facts behind it). It would be fun to have a judge decide that the US has to pay compensation; which they of course would refuse to do.