Andre Yoskowitz
19 Feb 2014 14:45
The New Zealand Court of Appeals has ruled that police raids on Kim Dotcom's mansion in 2012 were in fact legal, but the removal of evidence, including computers and hard drives, were "an unauthorized breach."
Dotcom's lawyer Ira Rothken says they will likely take the appeal to the Supreme Court over the validity of the warrants for the raid. On January 20th, 2012, authorities including the U.S. FBI executed warrants to raid Dotcom's mansion, seizing 135 laptops, desktops, portable hard drives, flash storage devices and servers.
The warrants were executed at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) who is still looking to bring Dotcom and a few other programmers to the U.S. to face criminal charges of copyright infringement and money laundering.
One of the biggest issues at hand is that the warrants were very vague and only referred to "breach of copyright" as the offense. That charge is valid in the U.S. but does not exist in New Zealand. The warrants also did not reveal under which country's laws the alleged offenses were committed. The original ruled in Dotcom's favor but the appeals court did not. The appeals court did admit the warrants were deficient in some respects but not enough to be nullified.