Slashdot Mirror
US Gov't Wants Megaupload Users To Pay For Their Data
angry tapir writes "U.S. federal prosecutors are fine with Megaupload users recovering their data — as long as they pay for it. The government's position was explained in a court filing on Friday concerning one of the many interesting side issues that has emerged from the shutdown of Megaupload, formerly one of the most highly trafficked file-sharing sites. Prosecutors were responding to a motion filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in late March on behalf of Kyle Goodwin, an Ohio-based sports reporter who used Megaupload legitimately for storing videos. The government argues that it only copied part of the Megaupload data and the physical servers were never seized. Megaupload's 1,103 servers — which hold upwards of 28 petabytes of data — are still held by Carpathia Hosting. Goodwin's options, prosecutors said, are either pay — or sue — Carpathia, or sue Megaupload."
The funny thing about that idea is that the government actually gets to choose whether a suit against it has merit and can go forward. Good luck with that in many cases.
Write failed: Broken pipe
Single point of failure is always bad
Yes. This, a thousand times, this.
trusting someone else to manage it is worse
Not really. You're just exchanging one set of risks for another. The risk of messing up on your own shouldn't be underestimated; a fat-fingered rm can cause a lot of damage. Of course, if you're really competent then you'll be aware of the single-point-of-failure problem in the first place and so will replicate as appropriate (and according to budget) but for a lot of people the risks from keeping their data in the cloud are actually lower than from keeping the data locally. It's a trade-off (and so must be optimized to particular situations, as with all trade-offs).
Things get more complex when you've got data which you want to keep confidential yet available (e.g., health records) but a lot of stuff doesn't need that level of caution.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
It's couldn't care less. Couldn't care less.
You cannot sue the federal government if they do not let you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Tort_Claims_Act
Don't equate "due process of law" with a jury trial. A jury trial is an example of due process, but it's not the only one. There are all manner of legal processes through which you can lose, have taken away, be temporarily deprived of, or otherwise forfeit property without going through a jury trial. As a most simple example: property gets seized as part of a search warrant all the time, as has happened in this case. Sometimes it is eventually returned, sometimes it is permanently retained as evidence. None of that requires a jury trial, even though it's often involved.
Which sounds nice and all, except that this is New Zealand and the judge is not at all convinced by our government's antics here. If they declare sovereign immunity (which they might) we are going to have some serious issues in new zealand - rightly so for our government's overreach.
And in contrast, when police do investigations and presume you may be suspicious (for things such as damage to your house incurred while they falsely investigated something) they absolutely are required to pay that back - you can easily win in small claims court for those damages. This is no different, since megaupload has not been found guilty of anything.
This is like arguing that the government can seize your car from the garage and dismantle it into thousands of parts, but that they haven't deprived you of your property, because you are free to hire a mechanic (at great cost) to put it all back together again.
The government DOES seize vehicles without due process.
And if drugs are even rumored to be some peripheral part of someone thought to be related the case in some way the cops will generally sell the property before the owner gets a chance to try to recover it. NORML reported a few years ago that half of the assets seized and sold in drug cases didn't even belong to anyone charged with a drug crime.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin