Dutchman sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for involvement in Megaupload – IT Pro – News


A court docket in New Zealand has sentenced a Dutch IT employee to 2.5 years in jail. The Dutchman was concerned within the file sharing service Megaupload, which might be used, amongst different issues, to share copyright-protected information.

The Dutchman was sentenced on Thursday along with one other former worker of Megaupload, writes ABC Information. The Dutch programmer was sentenced to 30 months in jail. His colleague, in flip, was sentenced to 31 months in jail. The utmost sentence for each males was 10 years, however the last sentence was decrease. The convicts should report back to the jail on August 1. The choose dominated that they solely should serve their sentences from August, as a result of the Dutchman’s mom is in poor health and the opposite convict will quickly have a second little one. reported Stuff.

Final 12 months, the 2 males already made a take care of the authorities in New Zealand. With this, the lads confessed that they had been concerned in a felony group. In return, the 2 former Megaupload workers had been allowed to face trial in New Zealand for copyright infringement and the US would drop their extradition request.

The convicted Dutchman labored as a programmer to maintain Megaupload operating, a service that allowed customers to share information with one another. In accordance with the court docket, the 2 males knew that Mega made cash from sharing copyrighted supplies, equivalent to music and movies. The US Division estimates that the harm suffered by rights holders quantities to greater than 800 million, unfold over the interval through which Megaupload was lively. Megaupload was based in 2005 and was shut down in 2012 on the request of the FBI. Megaupload itself would have earned $ 175 million, a lot of which got here from unlawful downloads, in keeping with the court docket.

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has not but been convicted. He’s nonetheless preventing extradition to the US. The Supreme Courtroom of New Zealand beforehand dominated that Dotcom could also be extradited, however the New Zealand Minister of Justice has but to go judgment on this, ABC Information writes on Thursday. The choice of the minister can nonetheless be appealed.