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Five Years Later, Legal Megaupload Data Is Still Trapped On Dead Servers (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the never-seen-the-light-of-day dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It's been more than five years since the government accused Megaupload and its founder Kim Dotcom of criminal copyright infringement. While Dotcom himself was arrested in New Zealand, U.S. government agents executed search warrants and grabbed a group of more than 1,000 servers owned by Carpathia Hosting. That meant that a lot of users with gigabytes of perfectly legal content lost access to it. Two months after the Dotcom raid and arrest, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a motion in court asking to get back data belonging to one of those users, Kyle Goodwin, whom the EFF took on as a client. Years have passed. The U.S. criminal prosecution of Dotcom and other Megaupload executives is on hold while New Zealand continues with years of extradition hearings. Meanwhile, Carpathia's servers were powered down and are kept in storage by QTS Realty Trust, which acquired Carpathia in 2015. Now the EFF has taken the extraordinary step of asking an appeals court to step in and effectively force the hand of the district court judge. Yesterday, Goodwin's lawyers filed a petition for a writ of mandamus (PDF) with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which oversees Virginia federal courts. "We've been asking the court for help since 2012," said EFF attorney Mitch Stolz in a statement about the petition. "It's deeply unfair for him to still be in limbo after all this time."

3 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. That's the big problem... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    When you keep your data in the cloud, and don't keep backups on hand, you're at the mercy of the powers to be. I pulled my data out of the cloud when I realized that I didn't need to have it on the Internet 24/7. A local file server works fine for my needs.

    1. Re:That's the big problem... by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Exactly. At the very least, "HAVE A BACKUP". I say anyone who doesn't understand this basic principal of cloud computing deserves to lose their data.

      Anyone who understands cloud computing probably isn't going to use the cloud.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  2. Of course its deeply unfair by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "deeply unfair" is central theme of all US copyright law.

    Why would you expect anything else?