MPAA Wants Megaupload User Data Retained for Lawsuits — Updated
Updated — Hollywood studios want a federal judge to preserve data on all the 66.6 million users of Megaupload, the file-sharing service that shuttered in January in the wake of federal indictments targeting its operators on allegations …
Context & Ripple Effects
Megaupload entered 2012 as the leading web-based file-sharing service, then was forced offline in January by federal indictments of its operators — a case that had already produced additional arrests and, just before the shutdown, a legal brawl with Universal Music over the viral celebrity-endorsement video that Megaupload later dropped Universal from litigating.
The MPAA's new filing extends that criminal case into civil territory: Hollywood wants a federal judge to order preservation of data on all 66.6 million users as raw material for future lawsuits. The story drew unusually broad same-day pickup — TorrentFreak, Ars Technica, Techdirt, Computerworld, Gizmodo and others — reflecting how much of the file-sharing world now hangs on what happens to this user data.
First-order effects
- The personal data of 66.6 million Megaupload users moves under a court-supervised retention regime, kept intact as a potential evidence pool for civil copyright suits rather than being purged with the defunct service.
- The MPAA gains a procedural foothold to convert the Justice Department's January takedown into a pipeline of follow-on civil claims against individual account holders.
Second-order effects
- Hosting companies still physically holding Megaupload's seized servers must bankroll open-ended storage of files they can neither delete nor monetize, absorbing the cost of a preservation order they never asked for.
- Uncertainty over who holds the user data is already being exploited: TorrentFreak reported alongside this story that criminals are sending fake settlement demands to former Megaupload users, making the litigation itself an attack surface.
Third-order effects
- If courts let civil plaintiffs freeze user data through criminal seizures, every major file-locker takedown becomes a de facto discovery event, raising the stakes of operating any cloud storage service reachable by US process.
- The pattern pushes offshore hosting providers and their customers toward architectures that keep user data outside single-jurisdiction seizure reach, fragmenting the once-centralized file-sharing market.
The trend: Criminal copyright enforcement is expanding into mass civil litigation over retained user data, turning cloud-storage takedowns into standing evidence-gathering operations.