The corrupt travesty that is the Kim Dotcom "prosecution"

From TorrentFreak:

As a personal birthday gift from the United States government, armed with automatic weapons, side harms, bullet-proof vests and attack dogs, they pulled my pregnant wife, infant children, staff and friends out into the cold morning air to make a Hollywood spectacle of an arrest that could have been executed with a simple knock on my door.

The powerful opinion from Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, a leading if not the leading Internet Copyright authority in the U.S. (and the World), completely dismantled the core of the United States case. Professor Lessig revealed the complete lack of a criminal statute for secondary copyright infringement. He summarized his thirty-seven page dissection (pdf) of the United States case at the start:

“It is my opinion that the Superseding Indictment and Record of the Case filed by the United States Department of Justice (‘DOJ’) do not meet the requirements necessary to support a prima facie case that would be recognized by United States federal law and subject to the extradition treaties between New Zealand and the United States. On the whole, the filings are not reliable.”

 

From TechDirt (echoing Larry Lessig, perhaps the most renowed expert in copyright law on the planet);

It is my opinion that the Superseding Indictment and Record of the Case filed by the DOJ do not meet the requirements necessary to support a prima facie case that would be recognized by United States federal law and subject to the US-NZ Extradition Treaty. An attempt has been made to extract facts from multiple sources and over a wide span of time, to organize a large number of otherwise disconnected facts by using systematic phraseology and to juxtapose phrases in order to create an impression of coherence and substance. However, the attempt fails to reach its goals and any impression of coherence or substance dissolves under examination. Insofar as they are alleged in the Superceding Indictment and the ROC, respondents’ actions were not prohibited by criminal statutes of the United States. Filings of the DOJ attempt to create a false impression of criminal guilt and are not reliable.