In July 2012 The Hollywood Reporter senior writer Daniel Miller landed a Skype interview with Kim Dotcom from New Zealand, days after a court postponement of his U.S. extradition hearing. Dotcom called the January 2012 raid on his Auckland mansion “an Osama bin Laden-style operation on an alleged copyright infringer.” Thirteen years later, he was still in New Zealand.
Then
The January 2012 raid had been the largest copyright-enforcement operation in New Zealand history — 72 heavily armed police descending on Dotcom’s Coatesville mansion by helicopter, freezing his assets, seizing servers, and arresting him at the FBI’s request on charges related to Megaupload, the file-hosting service he had founded. Miller’s reporting for THR had produced a cover story profile earlier that summer. The July Skype interview was a follow-up: Dotcom’s New Zealand court had postponed the substantive extradition hearing, and Dotcom was using the breathing room to talk to American media on his own terms.
The original FishbowlLA framing was that Dotcom had become one of the more aggressive defendants in entertainment-industry history at using press strategy — joining Twitter, granting Skype interviews, hosting press events, releasing music videos — to shape the political weather around his extradition case. The Hollywood Reporter’s coverage was sympathetic to the legal-rights questions while clear about what the actual charges entailed.
Now
The Kim Dotcom extradition case has now run for fourteen years. New Zealand courts approved extradition in 2017; the New Zealand Supreme Court upheld that ruling in 2020; the New Zealand Justice Minister formally signed the extradition order in August 2024 — almost thirteen years after the raid. As of 2026 Dotcom remains in New Zealand pending the resolution of his final appeals, with one of the longer-running extradition fights in recent Western legal history.
Megaupload itself was shut down in the 2012 raid and has never returned. The legal questions the case raised — about secondary copyright liability, about the limits of foreign extradition for U.S. federal charges, about the meaning of “willful” copyright infringement when applied to a hosting service — are now part of the case law that informs how DOJ approaches cyber-piracy cases. The Dotcom case is one of the most-cited matters in copyright-and-extradition academic literature.
Daniel Miller continued at THR for years and has subsequently been at the LA Times, where his investigative entertainment-industry work has continued. The Skype-interview era of cross-border defendant journalism that the 2012 Dotcom interviews represented has been largely superseded by encrypted-messaging-app interviews and Substack-published defendant statements — but Dotcom himself, fourteen years in, has remained one of the more prolific online defendants in any extradition-pending case anywhere.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: July 2012 snapshot