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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."
My data is safe. Its in the cloud!
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
2. Tell people to pay if they want to see the data ever again
3. Profit!
All this, of course, is contingent of the hostage taker having access to the data storage. Solution is simple: don't store your data in a country with such practices, or with a company with ties to said country. The Internet should finally recognize the US as damaged area and route around it.
But then... It's fricken' MegaUpload. It's always seemed sketchy. Who trusts important stuff to them?
People who don't know better. This doesn't make them idiots, they just make them ignorant in a specific field.
The same thing could be said about many, many people that are quite knowledgeable in IT yet happened to deposit their money in the wrong bank. And well, they lost a lot of money, not just some digital picture or whatever.
I think before criticizing the victims here we should give it some thought: Do we have *all our own assets* (physical and otherwise) in the right place? Maybe we have our health insurance in the megaupload equivalent of insurance and we don't know about it? Or our funds?
It's couldn't care less. Couldn't care less.
According to the MPAA, U.S. government, etc. these digital files are the same as physical property, and under the Fifth Amendment "No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". Note the wording - it doesn't state that the government must actually have seized the property in question (which the government argues they did not do) - it must merely have caused a person to be deprived of their property. By their own logic, through the actions of the government, Mr. Goodwin has been deprived of his property, and without his right to a jury trial.
But the government argues that they aren't liable because they only copied certain servers, and a forensic expert could retrieve the original files with access to the servers and hard disks. 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.
On the other hand, suppose you leave some property in the safe of your lawyer, who is subsequently arrested for committing some serious crime. You have now been deprived of your property, but it still exists in the safe. In this case, the government would not have a liability to release a criminal in order to let him open his safe and retrieve your belongings. I think that the government might win this one - if they are willing to let Mr. Goodwin have access to the servers, which they say they are. The Fifth Amendment does not require that the government ensure that you have access to your property that you have left in the care of another person, it only requires them to not be the ones depriving you of it.
The other big issue from the article is that the U.S. government plans to extradite Kim Dotcom and the employees of Megaupload (including web developers etc.) so that they can be charged with criminal copyright infringement in the U.S. Can you imagine what the outcry would be like if any other nation tried to extradite Americans working for a U.S. based file hosting company? What if British prosecutors decide to extradite the developers of {Dropbox,Google Drive,etc.} because some users were sharing episodes of Doctor Who? Most people support extraditions for serious offences like murder, but when it starts to be used for frivolous things like copyright infringement, that support is going to disappear.
You cannot sue the federal government if they do not let you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Tort_Claims_Act
Indeed, the gym tells you they are not responsible for my stuff. The person who steals my stuff from my locker however, is.
If my stuff is in a locker at the gym and a foreign government decides to open all the lockers and takes the content, I will not sue the gym: I will sue that government.
The Dutch will inherit the earth. If not, we'll settle for a bit of ocean. Beta delenda est!
Sue the Government. Might not work, but there is no reason why they can't be sued.
Yes [ ] - I would like to sue the US Government, endure a lifetime of tax audits, have my life turned upside-down & inside-out by the FBI, lose my job and family, and be laughed out of court by a Federal Judge for seeking reasonable redress for the bad acts of my government.
No [ ] - I was only filling out this form as part of a high school civics assignment.