MegaUpload's host pleads for cash to preserve user files
The cost of hosting 25 petabytes of data belonging to MegaUpload's users is too much for Carpathia Hosting to support on its own. — Carpathia said in court filings on Tuesday that the company is dedicating 1,100 servers …
Context & Ripple Effects
The MPAA's push last month to keep MegaUpload user data preserved for lawsuits landed squarely on the company least equipped to carry it: Carpathia Hosting, which inherited custody of 25 petabytes when the January takedown took MegaUpload itself out of the picture. Court filings this week show Carpathia dedicating 1,100 servers to files its former customer no longer pays for.
The dispute has been building since the site's seizure stunned the file-sharing world in January 2012, and the Universal video spat and RIAA payment-pressure campaign of prior years had already framed MegaUpload as a test case. What changed this week is that the collateral damage now has an invoice — and the host is asking the court to decide who pays it.
First-order effects
- Carpathia is absorbing the running cost of 1,100 servers holding 25 petabytes of user data with no paying customer behind it, and is petitioning the court for funds before the burden forces a different outcome.
Second-order effects
- If rights holders succeed in mandating retention, the economics of enforcement shift toward third-party infrastructure providers, who may start demanding indemnification or escrowed preservation fees before accepting cloud-storage customers in legally gray categories.
Third-order effects
- The episode sets up a structural question about who bears custody costs when a platform is seized mid-operation — millions of legitimate users' files sit frozen while courts, prosecutors, hosts, and users argue over ownership and payment, a pattern likely to recur in future takedowns of large storage services.
The trend: Cloud-hosting providers are being pulled into copyright-enforcement disputes as involuntary custodians of seized platforms' user data, forcing courts to assign both liability and preservation costs.