Supreme Court Delivers Judgement On Kim Dotcom Extradition Appeal

Today, just under 18 months after it heard the important Dotcom appeal, the Supreme Court has now delivered its reserved judgment.

For the Dotcom team, and especially for Kim and his family, it is a mixed bag. There is no final determination that he is to go to the United States. However, the Court has not accepted our important copyright argument and in our view has made significant determinations that will have an immediate and chilling impact on the Internet.

We will need to wait and see how the New Zealand and international Internet community reacts and responds to the judgment. It will be interesting to see how the challenges now faced by Internet Service Providers are responded to. Can they live with it? Will it result in access restrictions and further costs that we will all incur as a result? Or will our Government be lobbied to intervene and provide real and workable protections for them? With COVID-19 upon us, access to the Internet is now essential to our business community, more so than it has ever been in the past.

On the other side, the Court has accepted - correctly - that we should be able to argue that the serious procedural issues that have arisen in this case can and should be argued. This means there will be further argument in the Court of Appeal and/or the Supreme Court regarding these significant concerns that are well established in the evidence. This is significant and means that nothing further can happen until the further required hearings take place. Kim stays here, at home, with his family.

We welcome the opportunity to take the United States to task on its prosecution and management of this request for extradition. This has been a political case and the United States have sought to thwart Mr Dotcom running any meaningful factual defence to it.

Mr Dotcom is grateful for the community support he continues to receive. And he remains committed to making the Internet available and at a fair cost to everybody. At this time, this must surely be essential for all of us. We all need a platform to connect with each other. The Internet provides that and must be maintained for us all to benefit from.

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