Dotcom's extradition hearing, originally set for April, 2012, has now been continued until 2014. If Dotcom loses, there will be another year of appeals, at least. That means there will be three years of U.S. resources spent on the case.

How much of the Justice Department budget, especially in FBI and U.S. Attorney hours, has gone to extraditing and prosecuting Dotcom and Megaupload in Virginia? I doubt we will ever know. We do know from DOJ's 2014 budget request, for the criminal division alone, it has requested an additional $3.5 million and 11 positions, including 7 attorneys, to fight intellectual property crimes. It wants $2.6 million more for 25 positions, including 9 attorneys, to fight cybercrime. It wants $5 million extra for 28 positions, including 16 attorneys, for mortgage fraud. If the agents and DOJ lawyers working on Kim Dotcom's case were reassigned to work on other intellectual property, cybercrime or mortgage fraud cases, would these increases be necessary?

Why is there no check on how DOJ decides to spend its money or prosecutorial charging decisions? The courts can't tell DOJ who to prosecute, or not prosecute. It can only assign lawyers to defend those DOJ chooses, in its sole discretion, to charge with a crime.

In light of sequester cuts which so disproportionately affect defender services, why does DOJ get to add more agents and lawyers? Defender offices are being forced to close and lay off investigators and lawyers. U.S. Attorneys aren't having their paychecks delayed. Why should indigent defense counsel have their payments deferred, for work they've already performed?

The only thing Kim Dotcom and Megaupload did in the U.S. was lease servers which allowed people to upload material for storage and retrieval. That some people misused Megaupload by storing and sharing copyrighted material is hardly justification for expending the kind of resources used on terrorists or global drug kingpins.

Dotcom never stepped foot in the U.S. to commit a criminal act. The company's offices weren't in the U.S. There was more harm done to the American public --the millions of Megaupload users who lost the material they lawfully uploaded -- than to Hollywood and copyright holders. Hollywood and copyright holders who felt their works had been infringed had an adequate remedy in civil law: file a lawsuit for damages. Megaupload users have no recourse for their destroyed material.

The entire premise behind Dotcom's prosecution is dubious and untested. The Government's case rests on a theory of secondary copyright infringement which exists in civil statutes, not criminal statutes. Dotcom's lawyers explain in this whitepaper.The court in Virginia, or the 4th Circuit, or the U.S. Supreme Court, may well determine secondary infringement cannot give rise to criminal liability and reject DOJ's novel, untested theory. What then? Will Megaupload, Kim Dotcom and lawful users be entitled to damages from the unlawful seizure of the company, its assets and the servers? That will just be another expense.

DOJ doesn't get to define crimes. Federal crimes exist by statute. It is for Congress, not for the courts or prosecutors to state what is and what is not a crime. The Copyright Act does not provide that a person can be criminally liable for infringement committed by others. It's doubtful Congress ever intended to impose criminal liability for secondary copyright infringement.

While the Dotcom Indictment includes four or five instances where Megaupload principals knew of or caused infringing material to be uploaded to the servers, those few instances, even if proven, hardly justify the expenditure of millions of dollars and years of prosecutorial resources. They also don't justify the wholesale seizure of assets of a company without first providing the company an opportunity to respond and defend against the seizure.

DOJ is acting like Hollywood's handmaiden, when it should have told Hollywood to go file a civil lawsuit. This isn't a matter of national or even public concern.

The U.S. is already losing the battle to appropriate Dotcom's assets for restitution to "victims." So far NZ courts have freed $3.7 in assets to pay Dotcom's lawyers just in New Zealand.

A High Court decision in August freed up $2.7 million from seized funds to pay existing legal bills and a further $1 million to meet future costs.

By the time this case is over, the only people getting Kim Dotcom's and Megaupload's money are likely to be his lawyers. DOJ doesn't get to recoup the amount it spent on prosecuting the case from seized funds. There will be little left for restitution even if DOJ wins here in the U.S.

Congress needs to say no to DOJ and its ever increasing budget requests. It should consider its wasteful use of resources on prosecutions like Kim Dotcom and Megaupload, and decide the money is better spent complying with the constitutional obligation to provide adequate resources for the federal courts and defense of those DOJ chooses to prosecute.

Only if there's money left over after allotting constitutionally mandated resources, should Congress consider giving DOJ more money. In times like these, when there's not enough money to go around, someone needs to tell DOJ it's already had its cake, it doesn't get ice cream too.