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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."
but would carpathia give data to anyone who paid? doubt that. how would they even know how to get the data. are they even allowed to access the data? doubt that too.
seems like just washing of hands - amazingly fucked up investigation though. next they'll try to argue that they never did any legal action?? (which is actually true, "haha"). it's increasingly evident that the fbi tactic was that they assumed dotcom would settle for some prison time right away(thus not needing evidence or due process).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
This actually happens all the time. Happened to a friend of mine more than once even. So long as the police were acting in "good faith" you have no legal recourse.