FBI Ordered To Return Confiscated Hard Drives To Kim Dotcom

It's been quite the journey for Mega founder Kim Dotcom, but it seems like things are slowly coming to a conclusion. The High Court of New Zealand has ordered the FBI to return confiscated hard drives that were taken from Dotcom's home when it was initially raided last year. They have also ordered the US government to destroy all copies that they might have archived.

Essentially, the FBI messed up pretty badly, and so did New Zealand authorities when they raided Dotcom's mansion. It's said that they seized all sorts of stuff that actually had nothing to do with the reason that Dotcom's house was being raided, which is illegal, but the New Zealand police cloned the hard drives anyways and gave them to the FBI.

New Zealand authorities are now required to go through all of the illegally-seized evidence and determine what is actually relevant to the ongoing trial and return any evidence that isn't pertinent to Dotcom. However, we're not sure how all of that will be enforced, so as far as we know, there's no way to tell if all irrelevant evidence will be returned.

This is another win for Kim Dotcom and his legal team, and essentially a mark in the loss column for the New Zealand government. Dotcom is best known for launching Megaupload, which is a file-sharing site that was eventually shut down by the government because it hosted copyrighted content.

After the shutdown of Megaupload, Dotcom launched a similar service called Mega, but claimed it was completely legal this time around, thinking that he wouldn't have to deal with anymore legal scrutiny. However, his new file-sharing service is receiving criticism and anti-piracy advocates are wanting to shut down Mega for hosting copyrighted material yet again.

SOURCE: TorrentFreak