MegaUpload asks U.S. court to dismiss piracy charges
The cloud-storage service accused of piracy says the U.S. lacked jurisdiction and “should have known” that before taking down the service and throwing its founder in jail. — Follow @sandoCNET — MegaUpload's attorneys have asked …
Context & Ripple Effects
Four months after the January 2012 seizure that landed founder Kim Dotcom in a New Zealand jail and took down the service outright, MegaUpload is moving from defense to offense. Its dismissal motion attacks the prosecution's foundation — that the U.S. lacked jurisdiction and 'should have known' before acting — rather than contesting the piracy allegations themselves.
The filing lands against a backdrop of procedural fragility the government's own side has acknowledged: the judge warned in April that a trial may never happen, while the government argued in its 'no innocent bystander' response to the hosting providers that MegaUpload knew what it was storing. Users meanwhile remain locked out of their files, with at least one demanding the return of seized content as the MPAA pushes to keep servers preserved for civil suits.
First-order effects
- The DOJ now has to defend not just the piracy evidence but the legal basis for acting at all — a jurisdictional challenge that, if accepted, unwinds the entire indictment rather than individual counts.
- MegaUpload's users and hosting providers stay in limbo: the dismissal motion gives the court another reason to delay any decision on destroying or returning the seized servers while the case's validity is tested.
Second-order effects
- A successful jurisdictional challenge would force prosecutors to rebuild the case through extradition or treaty channels rather than a U.S. grand jury indictment, raising the cost of every similar cloud-storage action going forward.
- Civil plaintiffs like the MPAA, which wants user data retained for lawsuits, face a longer and less certain path to discovery if the criminal case collapses before the civil one gets access.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, cross-border enforcement against cloud services shifts from rapid seizure-and-indictment toward slower, treaty-bound processes — raising the threshold governments must clear before taking a storage service offline.
- The case becomes a test case for where cloud-storage liability sits: whether operators are treated as neutral hosts or as knowing participants, with hosting providers watching to see how far 'no innocent bystander' reasoning extends.
The trend: Government enforcement against offshore cloud-storage platforms is colliding with jurisdictional limits, pushing the battleground from copyright allegations onto the legality of the seizures themselves.