The gross procedural violations and disgusting behaviour of our (New Zealand) government have helped his case at this point. The judiciary have taken a pretty dim view of John Key's teams' antics.

...except when those orders are to build something innocuous.

If someone told me to build some filesharing software and give it to them, making me responsible for the content is absurd. Its basically the legal equivalent of holding Dropbox developers responsible for piracy.

The only difference is Megaupload was public and blatant enough in English-speaking media (of which the programmer was not a native speaker) for Americans to say "Yes, he should have known what it is for."

What got him in hot water was the fact that Megaupload clearly knew about specific instances of copyright infringement and still went ahead anyway. And this guy knew about it and kept working there helping them do it.

> I also had to sign my name to all of the evidence that had already been collected—for example, to the fact that Megaupload ignored complaints from time to time and did not remove illegal content fast enough. If anyone had any doubts about a file, Kim always calmed them down and said there was nothing to worry about.

> What got him in hot water was the fact that Megaupload clearly knew about specific instances of copyright infringement and still went ahead anyway. And this guy knew about it and kept working there helping them do it.

Do we know it was actually illegal in the country he resided?

As far as I'm aware, the reason he had to be brought to the US was he was within the law in his home country.