Torrentfreak: “Raid on Kim Dotcom’s Mansion Was Legal, Supreme Court Rules” plus 1 more

Raid on Kim Dotcom’s Mansion Was Legal, Supreme Court Rules

Posted: 23 Dec 2014 01:03 AM PST

Almost three years ago, New Zealand police carried out a spectacular and aggressive armed raid against individuals accused only of copyright infringement.

Acting on allegations from the United States government and its Hollywood partners, officers of STG, New Zealand's elite counter-terrorist force, raided Kim Dotcom's mansion. The German-born businessman was detained along with his wife Mona and their children.

Mid 2012, a High Court judge found that the warrants used in the raid were overbroad and therefore illegal, but a February 2014 Court of Appeal reached a different conclusion.

While acknowledging that the warrants contained flaws, a panel of three judges at the Court of Appeal found that overall the warrants were legal.
Dissatisfied with the ruling, Dotcom took the case all the way to the Supreme Court complaining that the warrants were overbroad and lacked detail. The verdict was handed down today.

In another disappointing ruling for the Megaupload founder, this morning the Supreme Court found that the 2012 raids on Dotcom’s home were carried out legally.

The raids on Kim Dotcom’s mansion. Legal, says Supreme Court DotcomRaid

Four Justices – John McGrath, William Young, Susan Glazebrook and Terence Arnold – dismissed Dotcom’s appeal while agreeing that the 2012 warrants were not unreasonably vague and general. Chief Justice Dame Sian Elias dissented, but her determination that there had been a miscarriage of justice was overruled.

One judge aside, the Court acknowledged that while the original search warrants were indeed deficient when detailing the alleged offenses, those shortcomings did not result in damage for Dotcom and his associates.

“The majority of the Court has decided that, although the search warrants were deficient in their description of the offenses to which they related, these defects did not result in any miscarriage of justice to the appellants,” the Court wrote in its summary.

“While the search warrants did not specify that the offenses were against United States law, or that the offenses were punishable by two or more years' imprisonment, this did not cause any significant prejudice to the appellants.”

When taking all circumstances into account, including the explanations given to Dotcom by police carrying out the raid, the Court found that Dotcom (and fellow claimants Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram Van Der Kolk) were given enough detail about the alleged offenses to which the search warrants related.

Dotcom, who along with his co-appellants will have to pay court costs of $35,000, aired his disappointment on Twitter.

“New Zealand Chief Justice Dame Elias got it right in both Supreme Court decisions in my case. She must be as frustrated as I am,” Dotcom wrote.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

EZTV Is Back Online After Pirate Bay Raid

Posted: 22 Dec 2014 10:55 AM PST

Nearly two weeks ago Swedish police raided a center in the city of Nacka, close to Stockholm.

The Pirate Bay was the main target of the raid, but collateral damage caused several other torrent sites to go down as well. These included EZTV, the go-to place for many torrenting TV fans.

Shortly after the raid TF spoke with the EZTV crew, who quickly managed to recover several servers so proxies could serve the latest torrents again.

Getting the entire site up and running proved to be more challenging, but today it appears to have fully recovered. This means that EZTV is accessible from its original EZTV.it domain once again.

The site is loading intermittently at the time of writing, but if it doesn’t pop up right away it should be visible after a few refreshes.

While the EZTV website was down for 13 days, the TV-torrent distribution group only stopped releasing torrents for a day or so. During the downtime fresh content was still shared on other torrent sites, such as ExtraTorrent.cc and Kickass.so

Curiously, coinciding with the comeback some proxies including Eztv-proxy.net have stopped working, most likely because they have to change a few settings to connect to EZTV’s backend.

While EZTV may have fully recovered, many other sites hit by the raid are still experiencing problems.

The Pirate Bay has put up a pirate flag and a counter, but no index or torrents. The torrent cache Zoink.it and the popular Istole.it tracker previously returned, but are currently offline again.

For now, however, it appears that EZTV is here to stay.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.