It has been in excess of two years since he was charged, so it is easy to forget about that the US still sees Kim Dotcom as a fugitive.
The United States Department of Justice still wishes to extradite him from New Zealand and bring him to trial on criminal copyright charges for assisting in piracy via measures he undertook at his past business, Megaupload. Dotcom remains fighting to keep out of the US, and an extradition trial is currently scheduled for February 2015.
Now, Dotcom has earned an temporary victory with a ruling from the New Zealand Court of Appeal, he’s finally getting some of the information that had been seized from his computers along with other equipment when his house was raided in January 2012.
This is surly a crucial win for Dotcom, who so far, has been in the position of having to create a legal defense without having access to his own company’s data. Now, he’ll recover “clones” of the units seized, including laptops, computers, portable hard drives, flash storage devices, and servers, in accordance with the New Zealand Herald. As a condition of getting back the information, Kim will need to supply New Zealand investigators with passwords so they can view it.
“The passwords can only be given to two New Zealand police officers, sworn to not provide the information to anyone else, to prevent the U.S. from benefiting from the illegally removed data and further violating Dotcom’s privacy,” Dotcom’s lawyer told the Bloomberg News.
Megaupload has been closed since the 2012 raid, and the US-based servers have been held by the federal government. For the one-year anniversary of the raid, Dotcom introduced a new cloud storage service, Mega.
