After almost seven months from the international operation, led by the FBI, which led to the closure of the cyberlocker giant, along with all 16 domains connected to
it and to the arrest of its funder, we come back to take a look at the case, for some updates.

Mr. Kim Schmitz (better known by his nickname “Kim Dotcom”), father of Megaupload as well as prime suspect of the many alleged offenses brought
against the site (from the massive and repeated copyright infringement to
financial fraud, through a myriad of other serious charges), has recently been
placed under house arrest in his luxurious villa in New Zealand, and is waiting
for the New Zealand High Court to rule over the many requests for his extradition filed by the United States of America, but seems to be already back in business.

First, Dotcom has announced his return to the web with Megabox, a new
subscription platform still under development, which will be specifically designed to allow artists who publish their own content to sell such content with very low costs for intermediation (without resorting to audiovisual collecting societies). Continuity with previous projects shall be guaranteed by the offer of free subscription to Megabox, for the first year, for all former subscribers of Megaupload.

Dotcom takes his second initiative via his Twitter account: through this channel, he has repeatedly accused the FBI and the New Zealand authorities have seized all his properties (both online and real ones) on the basis of “grave procedural errors”, which, if properly evaluated by the judges, would lead, in his opinion, to the immediate declaration of invalidity of the seizure orders themselves. On this front, however, prosecutors have already held that procedural errors have already been fixed, so that nothing said by Dotcom may lead to release his properties from seizure, and that all such properties are being held as “evidences and / or proceeds of crime”.
Meanwhile, the hosting company Carpathia is still holding, by order of the court and despite the hosting contract expired in April, about 25 petabytes of materials pertaining to the Megaupload case.

Schmitz’s last initiative, however, relates to politics. He recently posted a video on YouTube, advertising it via his new website www.kim.com, in which he sings his complaints against the Obama administration, accusing the President of the United States of being “held hostage by the major labels” and fo having carried out projects such as ACTA, SOPA and PIPA to “enslave the web to Hollywood
producers”. “The War for the Web has begun”, states the website, while the video shows images of pro-Anonymous protesters.

Leaving aside the provocative style of the statements declared by the alleged
“file-sharing guru”, the content of the video and of the website themselves seem pretty ambiguous and does not seem to be a prelude to an actual entry in politics: it is difficult, in short, to understand whether the purpose of Schmits is really the one to stand up to become a “champion of freedom for a web without rules”, or if this is not the umpteenth staging orchestrated for the sole purpose of collecting donations to relaunch his activities on the web.”