Judge asks for input over fate of orphaned Megaupload data
A U.S. federal judge has asked for more information to plan an evidentiary hearing concerning the fate of terabytes of data held in limbo since the shutdown of the Megaupload file-sharing site. — A U.S. federal judge has asked …
Context & Ripple Effects
The January shutdown of Megaupload left a problem nobody planned for: terabytes of ordinary users' files seized alongside the alleged infringing infrastructure, with no process for returning them. The fight over that data has run all year — the MPAA pushed to keep it retained for its civil lawsuits in March (MPAA's push to keep user data for lawsuits), a user formally demanded his files back in April (a user's demand for the return of seized files), and June brought the New Zealand high court ruling the search warrants behind the raid were illegal (the ruling that the search warrants were illegal) — all while Megaupload pressed the U.S. court to dismiss the piracy charges outright.
The judge's request for more input before an evidentiary hearing signals that data custody has become a live procedural question rather than an afterthought to the criminal case. Whoever holds the data — and under whose authority — now needs a legal answer, and the hearing is where the court will try to construct one.
First-order effects
- Megaupload's former users remain unable to recover legitimate files nine months after the shutdown, and the evidentiary hearing is their first realistic path to getting them back.
- The U.S. government and the MPAA face a scheduling decision: retaining the data serves their litigation interests, but every month of custody extends their exposure on the question of what they may lawfully do with non-infringing material.
Second-order effects
- Other cyberlockers under scrutiny since the raid, RapidShare among them, now watch a case study form in what happens to user data when a host is taken down — a direct input into their own compliance and takedown policies.
- Hosting companies and rights holders alike get a template from whatever procedure the judge adopts: either a mechanism for returning lawful content during criminal proceedings, or confirmation that seizure freezes everything until trial ends.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large-scale takedowns will force courts to treat user-data custody as a separable legal question from the operator's guilt — an ungainly gap between copyright enforcement and property rights that Congress or the courts will eventually have to close.
- The case feeds the broader chill across the file-hosting sector: operators who cannot guarantee users' files survive even an unproven accusation against the platform face pressure toward models with less third-party content at stake.
The trend: Criminal takedowns of major file-sharing platforms are turning user data itself into contested evidence, pushing courts to improvise custody rules that neither copyright law nor cloud-storage contracts anticipated.