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Kim Dotcom Has 6 Million Reasons to Celebrate

The founder of Megaupload has reason to celebrate after getting his personal assets and luxury cars back.
Image via Reuters

Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload and perhaps the most notorious Internet fugitive today, has reason to celebrate.

Nearly two years after police raided his mansion in New Zealand seizing cash, personal assets and over $6 million worth of luxury cars, a New Zealand High Court ruled today that his assets would be returned to him and his wife.

The court denied a request from the New Zealand police to extend the order freezing his assets, effectively handing them back over to Kim after two years of seizure.

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Kim Dotcom: The man behind Megaupload. Watch it here.

Dotcom was arrested in 2012 by New Zealand police, via an order from the FBI, on charges of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, online piracy, money laundering and racketeering from his company Megaupload.

Dotcom, however, maintains his innocence and that the arrest and seizure of his assets was unlawful.

“This case is a huge embarrassment to the Department of Justice and the government of New Zealand,” Dotcom told VICE News. “And we are just getting started."

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has targeted the White House with a song entitled ‘Mr President’, which portrays Obama as a Hollywood puppet who will not fight to keep the internet ‘free.'

Kim founded Megaupload as a file sharing and storage site in 2005. He describes it on his website as a way for “users to upload and store data securely, and to access data from any location via the Internet. Megaupload and cloud services of this kind have important and substantial non-infringing uses.”

Kim Dotcom's mega is going public in an unconventional way. Read more here.

Soon after its establishment, however, millions of people began using Megaupload to pirate and store movies, music, pornography and software. After his arrest, Dotcom’s bank accounts were frozen and police seized over $17 million of his personal assets.

In response to his arrest and ahead of New Zealand’s general elections in September, Dotcom founded a political organized called the Internet Party last month.

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A large-scale light projection of German-born Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom’s avatar, under the legend ‘United Stasi of America’ was projected onto the US Embassy in Berlin in the early hours of July 8.

Although Dotcom, as a non-New Zealand citizen, is not permitted to run for leader of the Internet Party, he is the main backer of it and provides most of its funds.

The party is founded on the ethos of Internet freedom and privacy, principles that Dotcom has been a vocal advocate of for most of his life.

"The Internet Party is our way of taking the Internet back from the government, the NSA and copyright extremists," Dotcom told VICE News. "The Internet Party has been created for the Internet generation which wants to vote for something they are passionate about."

In celebration of this philosophy and the launch of the Internet Party, Dotcom threw a massive pool party last weekend at his estate in Coatesville, New Zealand.

He sent out a public invite on Twitter, inviting Internet Party members to his house. Over 700 of Dotcom’s fans showed up to the party, where they got to swim in his pool, explore the grounds of his massive estate and pose for pictures with Dotcom himself.

Although Dotcom’s organization is not technically a formal political party quite yet, he applied for registration last Monday to the New Zealand Electoral Commission for recognition as a formal party, which will likely take four to six weeks to complete.

If approved, this could be Dotcom’s biggest foray into mainstream political life yet.

Follow Olivia Becker on Twitter: @obecker928