Megaupload

The jurisdiction issues related to the Megaupload case can be summarized into four key aspects that respectively are, whether cyberspace included in United States territory, whether defendants should be extradited according to their crimes, does racketeering exists associated with intellectual property case and could this case apply to other cloud service. Those four issues are of significant to governments on conducting jurisdiction to defendants derived from cloud service.

The first concern relates to international IP infringements on the Internet and thereby the issue of extradition. As I learned that national jurisdiction has traditionally extended to activities that take place within a country. Therefore, the boundaries of state jurisdiction should be defined while taking cyberspace into consideration. For the second issue, there are five crimes listed under United States law, the accused should be extradited if they commit one of them. Racketeering might be constituted when the accused be proved to specifically know the uploaded contents are infringing. It is possible that the popular content is non-infringing under reward business model with cloud service. In addition, the US jurisdiction to Megaupload case will significantly affect international users of many other US-based cloud computing services.

Jurisdictions are different between countries. It would be increasingly challengeable for organizations to manage liability if a website can be accessed from multiple jurisdictions.