An attorney for MegaUpload — which was shut down by the US government earlier this month, and whose assets have been frozen, following copyright complaints from the entertainment industry — says that the US Attorney General is planning to destroy all its user data within a week. With its assets frozen, MegaUpload can no longer pay to host its data with its service provider, and so the AG will cooperate with the erasure of tens of millions of users' personal files — backups, family photos, personal videos, financial records, and even movies and music in production by independent artists who used MegaUpload as a file-locker while their produced their work. TorrentFreak characterizes this as the destruction of evidence, and I think that's right.
Rothken explains that MegaUpload is determined to protect the interests of its users, but that its hands are tied without help from the authorities. The looming data loss is linked to unpaid bills at Cogent Communications and Carpathia Hosting where MegaUpload leased some of its servers.
“We of course would like to think the United States and Megaupload would both be united in trying to avoid such a consumer protection calamity whereby innocent consumers could permanently lose access to everything from word processing files to family photos and many other things that could never practically be considered infringing,” the lawyer told TorrentFreak.
“Megaupload’s assets were frozen by the United States. Mega needs funds unfrozen to pay for bandwidth, hosting, and systems administration in order to allow consumers to get access to their data stored in the Mega cloud and to back up the same for safekeeping.”
MegaUpload has contacted the US Attorney’s office with a request to unfreeze assets including money and domains so users can get access to their personal data. If this doesn’t happen, the consequences for many MegaUpload users and the future of other cloud hosting services will be disastrous.
MegaUpload User Data Soon to be Destroyed
(Thanks, thatanonymouscoward!)
