AUCKLAND, New Zealand—The legal judgments keep coming against Kim Dotcom and his Mega empire. After learning late last year that a New Zealand judge had ruled the Megaupload-turned-Mega founder could be extradited to the U.S. to face charges of copyright infringement and money laundering, another New Zealand judge ruled earlier this month that Mega, a cloud storage and file sharing service, must turn over to Kazakhstan officials information related to users implicated in a 2014 leak of Kazakhstan government documents
The Kazakhstan government claimed stolen sensitive documents were uploaded onto a site owned by Mega Ltd. and asked the court to order Mega to produce the documents and other information; Justice Simon Moore agreed. On May 12, Moore ordered Mega to produce documents regarding the IP and email addresses of some of its users, as well as their contact details and account and payment information. The information would be given to a U.S. District Court in New York, where Kazakhstan filed a civil suit in 2015 against a number of unknown persons believed to have hacked a government computer system and email account.
Mega opposed the request for a number of reasons, including Kazakhstan’s record on human rights.
"Obviously we're very disappointed,” Mega Chairman Stephen Hill told reporters. “We're very concerned about the human rights record of the Kazakhstan government."
Kazakhstan was ordered to cover the costs incurred by Mega in supplying the information to the U.S. Court.
It was unclear how soon the information needs to be turned over, and Mega officials said they would get advice from counsel on how to proceed.
