NZ Supreme Court Gives A Mixed Bag Extradition Ruling To Kim Dotcom; Extradition Still Alive, But He Can Raise Procedural Issues

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It's been almost a decade since US and New Zealand forces did a silly made-for-Hollywood (and possibly by Hollywood) raid of Kim Dotcom's home in New Zealand for the crime of running a cloud storage service that some people used for infringing works. Since that time, Dotcom has been fighting extradition charges to the US. The case has taken many crazy twists and turns, including the US government seizing his assets by claiming he's a fugitive, even as he's been going through the standard legal process to determine if extradition is proper (and there's a very strong legal argument it is not even remotely proper).That said, while Dotcom has won rulings showing illegal activity in how he was surveilled and arrested, he's also lost his attempts to block the extradition.The latest ruling, from New Zealand's Supreme Court is unfortunately more of the same. The court has found that he can be extradited on 12 of the 13 charges against him, but also noted the procedural problems that have plagued the case mean that he still cannot be extradited. Specifically, the Supreme Court found that Dotcom (and his colleagues who were also arrested) were denied judicial review of the original ruling in the district court in 2015.Dotcom and his lawyers have (accurately) stated that the ruling "is a mixed bag." But it's mostly mixed with bad news for Dotcom. The good part is just that he doesn't have to get shipped off to the US right away.But on the whole this is a bad ruling for Dotcom. The key issue at play gets deep into the copyright weeds, about theories regarding criminal inducement of infringement, and whether or not New Zealand and the US have matching crimes. Unfortunately, so far it looks like the New Zealand courts (like too many of the US courts) don't really care to look at the actual specifics of what's in the law and just lump together a bunch of different concepts around "copyright infringement bad," without being willing to understand that building a platform that is used for infringement is not the same thing as infringing yourself. The court didn't seem to understand the difference here -- which is unfortunately not that surprising, but it is disappointing. These kinds of rulings damage the open internet, limit the kinds of services that can be built, and bring us closer to a locked down broadcast-only internet, the kind which Hollywood wants.

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Thanks To Fair Use, One Man Is Trying To Preserve Old School Video Game Manuals

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We have discussed at some length the intersection of copyright laws and antiquated video game preservation. Going back at least a decade now, most of that focus has been on whether the use of emulators and the digitization of games that no longer have systems to run them ought to qualify as fair use. You can couple that with the more recent trend of some museums with a focus on the art of video games seeking to get exceptions to the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules in order to preserve both offline and online games that might otherwise be lost to the ether. When viewed properly through the lens that copyright law exists for the purpose of promoting more culture, not less, it should be immediately obvious that preserving culture in this manner is one of the chief aims of fair use and copyright law in general.But it's not just the games themselves being preserved by fair use provisions. One dedicated man has led a six year effort to digitize and preserve the game manuals for every Super Nintendo game ever created.

In some cases, they’re lost forever! Other times, we’re lucky to have folks like Peebs, who devote an incredible amount of time to collecting, cataloguing and then ensuring manuals to every Super Nintendo game ever released are scanned and uploaded, so that future generations can enjoy them as much as we did.For the last six years he’s also been hosting a Twitch channel, where he’s been slowly trying to beat every single Super Nintendo game. A lot of the time, in order to complete a section or just look something up, he’d need to consult the manual. “It didn’t take long to realize that most of the time when I went to look for a scan of a manual for control schemes or just backstory, they mostly either didn’t exist or they were all scattered to the far corners of the Internet,” Peebs says. “There was a severe lack of organization: mislabeled files/links, old defunct websites with broken interface/files, incomplete scans, etc.”

There were around 600 manual scans available on the SNES Manual Archive when it opened to the public in September 2020. Since then, a community has sprung up around the project, with fans around the world eager to help out with their own submissions.“I got approximately 20 scans sent in on the first day, and since then I’ve received about one per day,” Peebs says. “People have started letting me know when they buy a manual so I can mark it off as incoming so other people don’t buy the same thing. I’d say we probably have a total of another 15-20 manuals in the mail from people around the world right now that will be scanned and uploaded when we get them.”That leaves just over 100 manuals, at least for Western games or versions of games. Though the project is looking to expand its Super Famicom collection in the future. “The support of people contributing to the project has been super surprising and I’m very thankful for every manual that has been submitted.”

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