Kim Dotcom's Assets Seizure Order Ruled "Null and Void" 139
thomst writes "Cnet's Greg Sandoval reports that New Zealand police filed for the wrong kind of restraining order--the kind that didn't allow for DotCom to have a court hearing prior to the seizure — and that was a mistake, according to a report in the New Zealand Herald. A court has now ruled that the restraining order that enabled police to seize his assets is 'null and void,' and a review of the mistakes made will soon be conducted by New Zealand's attorney general, according to the Herald. The paper noted that there's no guarantee that DotCom will prevail. His lawyers must prove the absence of good faith when the procedural error was made."
When will they seize Time Warner's assets? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'm divided (Score:5, Interesting)
So if he was innocent but they had the correct paperwork, everything would be ok with you?
Upcoming consequences (Score:4, Interesting)
As an American, I'm glad to see foreign courts aren't completely acquiescing to the same "moral imperatives" our politicians and intellectual property owners demand we submit to.
As an epileptic, I'm dreading all the "clever" headline puns describing Kim Dotcom's "seizure disorder".
As a geek, I can't wait to debate whether the it should have instead been ruled NIL, as well as NULL and VOID.
Re:I'm divided (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a fairly big statement to make without any supporting evidence. Care to share?
Re: jailed for good? (Score:5, Interesting)
My feeling is this... If Kim was guilty of stealing credit cards, stock scams or selling cracked games to pirate factories, he should be arrested and tried on those counts.
Instead, it looks like they decided it was far more lucrative to take down his MegaUpload site, which is relatively legitimate by comparison to ANY of those other things.
Justice shouldn't be opportunistic, waiting for the "bad guy" to build up something "really worth seizing".
Re:I'm divided (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. You know the post the other day regarding the American getting charged with child pornography for having manga on his PC? This one:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/03/15/2034252/canadian-charges-against-us-manga-reader-dropped
That happened because the government created the precedent by prosecuting John Sharpe for his drawings. Since Sharpe also had pictures of child pornography, and indeed was likely a child toucher, it was an easy win because the public vilified him for BOTH things (drawings/books and the pictures) and therefore decided that throwing away their rights was worth it to put him in prison rather than realizing there's two separate cases there (the thought expression vs. the pictures).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._v._Sharpe
Re:When will they seize Time Warner's assets? (Score:5, Interesting)
There is only one way to find out and that is to force exposure of the corruption of the copyrightists, those that most distributed software to enable copyright infraction in order shut down a public internet and convert it into a mass media controlled internet.
That video mentioned http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka5oLSuiUGs [youtube.com] needs to be pushed as far and wide as possible.
Let's see how the corrupt US courts deal with this problem. Let's chain mail this video as publicly and embarrassingly around the world as possible. I have already spent a chunk of time emailing the link to political parties and labour organisations.