

there would no corporate entity that would be off limits to overzealous U.S.

"Since almost every corporate entity around the world uses servers in the United States.

courts can charge foreign corporations with crimes is an "important public policy issue dealing with national sovereignty" that the U.S. courts have allowed charges against foreign individuals, "but corporations are different than individuals," Rothken said. from New Zealand and other countries, the DOJ said.īut Ira Rothken, one of Megaupload's lawyers, said the DOJ is asserting broad new jurisdiction over foreign companies with this case. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia plans to serve Dotcom and other officers of the company with the summons after they are extradited to the U.S. for having consistently taken steps to evade detection in the United States." "It would also reward Defendant Megaupload, whose business was dedicated to criminal copyright violations. "To dismiss the Superseding Indictment against Defendant Megaupload - whose business model is not based on traditional goods and services delivered through brick-and-mortar stores but instead on online intellectual property piracy - because the company has purposefully avoided establishing an office in the United States would be unprecedented and unjust," the DOJ's lawyers wrote. The company had more than 500 servers located in Virginia, where the charges originated, and the company filed a civil lawsuit against a record label in California court in December 2011, the DOJ said. The DOJ, in its response to the motion to dismiss, argued that "Megaupload's business took place in, profited from, and injured copyright holders" in the U.S. lacks jurisdiction to prosecute the Hong Kong-based company and has not served the company with the charging documents. In May, Megaupload lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the charges against the company, arguing that the U.S. 19 after it filed criminal copyright infringement, racketeering and money laundering charges against it, sister company Vestor Limited, and founder Kim Dotcom. The DOJ shut down the file sharing site on Jan. "This line of reasoning leads to the incredible conclusion that a foreign corporation can commit crimes in the United States and secure what amounts to complete immunity from prosecution, simply by ensuring that it has no address or principal place of business here," the DOJ's lawyers wrote. court rulings, the DOJ said in its response to the motion to dismiss, released Tuesday. law runs counter to more than eight decades of U.S.

Megaupload's assertion that foreign corporations cannot be prosecuted for violations of U.S. Department of Justice said in a colorfully worded opposition to the file-sharing site's motion to dismiss copyright infringement charges against it. simply because it had no physical presence in the country, the U.S. Megaupload cannot avoid prosecution in the U.S.
