Good news Kim: You can travel to the US, and get a fair hearing

Kim Dotcom has emerged as a huge fan of Donald Trump.

He posts messages in support of the US president; he re-tweets him, and he frequently attacks CNN, James Comey and other perceived enemies of the White House.

Notably, he’s offered evidence to back a campaign by Mr Trump’s favourite broadcaster, Sean Hannity, about the death of a Democratic operative (which foundered after Fox News recanted the story the conspiracy theory was based on and Mr Hannity quietly dropped his crusade but he and Dotcom remain online pals).

It’s probably hard to find anyone in New Zealand who admires Mr Trump more.

Fair enough. Dotcom's entitled to his political opinion.

But it does make me think: what is now stopping Dotcom from voluntarily going to the US to face trial, and putting the whole Megaupload episode behind him?

A friendlier landscape
Dotcom has previously argued that the tentacles of the Obama administration would prevent him from getting a fair trial.

But now there’s a president he trusts in the White House. Trump appointees have been put in charge of the Department of Justice and the FBI, and there is a Trump-engineered majority on the Supreme Court.

And even the Obama regime didn't turn out to be that foreboding. Andrus Nomm, who was co-accused with Kim Dotcom, Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk in the original FBI indictment, was released from jail after serving 287 days of a 366-day sentence in 2015 (according to his LinkedIn account, Nomm – who was released in November 2015, is now working for a company in Estonia.

He was arrested in February 2015 after voluntarily returning to the US and pleading guilty. The Dotcom camp maintains his plea deal involved ratting on his co-accused but it could equally be seen as the quid pro quo for his voluntary return and not contesting the charges).

As a bonus, if Dotcom travelled to the US, he would probably regain his cause celebre status.

So if you believe in the strength of your case, what’s stopping you, Kim?

One factor could be the civil suit brought by the music and movie industries. The RIAA and MPAA maintain Dotcom stiffed them out of hundreds of millions in profit as Megaupload offered cash incentives to its members who uploaded popular content (some of which was allegedly pirated), then sold advertising and subscriptions around that content without giving artists or rights holders a penny of the proceeds (unlike say, YouTube, which gives rights holders the option to have offending material removed – say a copyrighted song used as the background to a wedding video – or get a cut of ad revenue generated by the clip).

The RIAA and MPAA case could be bolstered by the US government’s claim that members of the Megaupload crew were not always truthful in their statements to rights holders about taking action to remove infringing material.

On February 17, the High Court in Auckland upheld a District Court decision to extradite Kim Dotcom and his co-accused, citing an answerable case for fraud. Dotcom and co are now headed for the Court of Appeal, with a date yet to be set for the hearing. 

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