Megaupload Trial May Never Happen, Judge Says
The US Government accuses Kim Dotcom and the rest of the “Mega Conspiracy” of running a criminal operation. — Charges in the indictment include engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement …
Context & Ripple Effects
Kim Dotcom's legal fight has moved fast since January's coordinated arrests, which left the Megaupload CEO seeking bail while more co-defendants were picked up in the same sweep. By late February he had won the bail battle against US Government efforts to return him to prison, but the underlying racketeering and copyright-conspiracy charges from the January indictment remained untouched.
What changes with this report is the timetable itself: the presiding judge now says the criminal trial may never happen at all. That is an unusual public admission in a case the US Government has framed as a marquee prosecution, and it explains why outlets from PC World and the New Zealand Herald to Techdirt and The Verge all carried the story on the same day.
First-order effects
- Kim Dotcom and his co-defendants remain in open-ended legal limbo — no trial date means the racketeering and copyright-conspiracy allegations stay unresolved indefinitely rather than moving toward a verdict.
- The US Government loses control of the narrative clock on its flagship file-sharing prosecution: a case built as a deterrent now has its own lead judge publicly doubting it will ever reach a jury.
Second-order effects
- The defense gains structural leverage — with no trial horizon, motion practice and procedural challenges become the primary battlefield, and every month of delay raises the cost of holding the case together.
- Hollywood and the music labels, who pushed for criminal prosecution as the enforcement template against cloud-storage operators, face the prospect that their test case stalls in procedure instead of setting precedent.
Third-order effects
- If mega-indictments against offshore operators routinely collapse into years-long pre-trial proceedings, rightsholders may shift back toward civil suits and intermediary pressure rather than criminal referrals as the default enforcement path.
- The case becomes a reference point for how national jurisdictions handle evidence and defendants spread across borders — the slower that machinery proves, the weaker the deterrent effect of transnational criminal copyright cases.
The trend: Criminal copyright enforcement against offshore file-hosting operations is colliding with the slow machinery of multi-defendant, cross-border trials, testing whether prosecution can serve as a workable deterrent model.