At a hearing Monday in Auckland, New Zealand, Dotcom denied that he is guilty of the Internet piracy charges he is facing in the United States. The New Zealand Herald reports that Dotcom’s attorney, Paul Davidson, argued that his client should be eligible for bail because “he is not a person who is inherently motivated to disappear or breach conditions. There is no flight risk.”
The judge wanted more time to make his decision about the request, “given the breadth of issues covered in this bail application and the seriousness of the issues.” The judge said his final decision would come no later than Wednesday.
FBI officials are seeking to have Dotcom and three of his cohorts extradited to the United States, where they would face charges of Internet piracy and money laundering. The charges are related to the file-sharing Web site Megaupload.com, which was shut down Jan. 20 as part of the indictment.
Shortly after news spread of the Justice Department’s action, that federal agency’s Web site went down, as did the site of Universal Music. The outages were a result of a cyberattack from the informal hacking collective known as Anonymous, which went after the sites in retaliation for the crackdown on Megaupload.
