Megaupload User Data to Be Destroyed

Shyeah... the taking down of Megaupload demonstrates that the government can do everything that they said they needed SOPA and PIPA to accomplish. Can you imagine the kind of shenanigans that would be going on if they passed those POS pieces of legislation?

they better give me full access to re-download my ~340GB of data. i'm really annoyed at this.

The state of this country is surreal.

This is really sad, megaupload was my favorite site for hosting/downloading mods for pc games

WE need to bail on the USA, invest in infrastructure overseas.

I want to know who name the US police of the world. So if you do not respect their their laws they cant hunt you in any part of the world, shutdown your business and trow you in jail. I still remember that in 94 the US started a antipiracy campaing in a country in south america because they changed the source of equipment from Miami to China.

It will go on only until enough people get together to stop it. As long as people don't care about their rights, their rights will be slowly taken away.

The government doesn't have the first clue as to how to effectively attack piracy. It's like watching a bunch of 5 year olds clean your kitchen - they know what the end result is supposed to be but don't have any idea how to get there and in the end everything is messier than it was in the beginning.

Would help if this wasn't all bankrolled by greedy corporations who don't understand cause & effect in a capitalist market.

Exactly what "Right" do you think is being violated here?

It really wouldn't make sense for the government to actually delete the data unless they've already backed it all up. They'd be deleting evidence in their own case. MegaUpload and one of the hosting sites are looking for legal remedies. The problem there is since the data is evidence in an on-going case the government wouldn't have to turn it over, nor would they have to allow access, until after the case is resolved.

It's not people, it's money and power, and corporations have it, and the people are too stupid to realize that. Corporations have people convinced it's "class warfare" if you decry their practices, or that people not wanting to get ....ed is "envy", or that everyone or anyone can be rich. The fact is capitalism works like this you get power and leverage and once you have it, it's virtually impossible for someone who is not of the same stature to compete. Period. Can a mom and pop shop compete with Walmart heck no... is it the case that Walmart is better , no it's simply a case of they ahve the power and leverage to dominate the market, end of story.

I should edit that to say, unless the government has already backed up the data or gathered it all, it would make sense for them to allow the hosting companies to "purge" it. As its evidence in their on-going case. From my understanding the deletion comes from the companies themselves and not via goverment order.

I'm curious why they don't have access? Surely the government didn't just come in and take the servers or drives?

See.....
This is why you should never, ever, use "cloud" services..................................................

Protection from unreasonable search and seizure perhaps? How about the freedom of speech, which at least some of the files pertain to; or maybe everyone else's rights? Im Canadian, maybe I have Canadian files stored in megaupload, which according to Canada is completely legal.

I think the MegaUpload folks are trying to use 'public pressure' to get their stuff back. They have NO IDEA the world of $hit they have gotten themselves into.

Oh, and i you backed up your shit on their servers, then you deserve everything you are getting.

Richeemxx is correct. As I noted in another post a couple weeks or so ago, MegaUpload is already labled a criminal enterprise from a legal stanpoint. As such, all of its assets and products become evidence of that criminal act. As such law enforcement would have the right to hold onto those files, etc. I'm not all that familiar with Canadian law, but I believe similar laws apply there as well. Either way, since you as an owner if the file/s are not the focus of the investigation (they aren't targeting you for prosecution) the same burden of search and seizure does not fully apply. In other words, like I may have explained in the past, you may be keeping stuff in your friends garage. Your friend gets in trouble with the cops and their garage is searched by the cops. Your rights to your stuff are limited because you were not in physical ownership of any of it. You gave up any reasonable expectation of privacy by entrusting your stuff to a third party. That is basically the justification the FBI will use in terms of looking through any files they've got their hands on. You will find that unless laws are changed, or that by-laws of cloud services companies are written a bit better, this could happen anytime. Unless privacy is implicitly stated or alluded to, you give control of your stuff to a third party you risk it being cuahgt up in their wrongdoing.

Someone else mentioned that this proves SOPA and PIPA were useless then. That's not entirely correct. What SOPA and PIPA would have done is one thing; it would have rolled everything into one legal bullet. Right now, the government's prosecutors will have to compile a case with a number of different laws. Laws like SOPA/PIPA and even going back to many pieces of anti-crime law, it rolls existing law together with a few bits of new law, to make a single piece of legislation for legal coverage. It's meant to cover the bases of a problem that will be litigated more than a couple times and give prosecutors an iron-clad legal case. Which explains why it is also so easy for such a piece of legislation to overreach like SOPA did.

It appears that their "inability/refuse/lazy" to check every acc filter out the piracy content & leave the legal user alone. Instead they just kill everyone including the legal user.

So I guess if a house consist of Terrorist and a bunch of innocent children, the US gov will just nuke the house instead?

Sue the government if you lost important data. Especially if its time sensitive.

i hope they AT LEAST give us 24 hours access...i'm mad cause i had alot of stuff of on MU that i didn't keep a 2nd backup off (-)smacks head into wall(-)

p.s. if anyone is looking for a similar free host:
http://www.peeje.com/upload

imo it's better than megaupload since peeje gives u DIRECT-download links

i hope they AT LEAST give us 24 hours access...i'm mad cause i had alot of stuff of on MU that i didn't keep a 2nd backup off (-)smacks head into wall(-)

p.s. if anyone is looking for a similar free host:
http://www.peeje.com/upload

imo it's better than megaupload since peeje gives u DIRECT-download links

I agree the government was overreaching here, but nobody should be storing important data on Megaupload that isn't backed-up somewhere else anyway. Big deal...

go usa! oh wait...

The US is going to keep pushing the bounds till they finally wake up a sleeping giant... right here in our own borders... I'm proud to be a part of that sleeping giant. Molon Labe!

And this, ladies and gentleman, is why cloud computing will always be trumped by local storage. Now imagine is something like this happened to Google. How much information would be lost.

Don't say it wouldn't happen because nobody expected it to happen to Megauploads.

"Unreasonable search and seizure" doesn't include reasonable search and seizure in a criminal case. While it would be nice if users could get their files back and other countries can complain about the US overreaching, this is definitely not a violation of the US Bill of Rights.

so is swizz beat's going to jail over this

Frankly, we had a cloud outsource company trying to sell their product, and they were telling us how they could install "illegal" software for us, whatever. Major company, largest cloud setup in the state. We rejected it base fears for the technology, the reality of a legal risk, did not even occur to us. if we had gone with this and something similar had happened (the future of SOPA), a 100 million dollar a year company that employs over 150 people, with families, would have been shut down.

This is the exact reason why I will not rely on the cloud for my data. I hope that everyone who uploaded data to this kept a copy on there hard drive.

Hey Chaos! lmao, what shocked me was how they said:

"look, everyone uses illegal software, so we know that's what scares people about cloud, so we'll help you install and provide illegal software on the cloud, no problems"

no doubt they say that to every client. one day soon, multiple legitimate companies and the families they support will be shut down, leaving many unemployed. a single cloud my support many companies, and clearly the government is incapable of doing this piecemeal.

what about the users from around the world, not in US, that used the service? Do the feds have authority to wipe out all their data as well? I mean, since when can the US bully other countries in the individual and personal manner like this? There are many users who used this as a storage for personal stuff. One server in the country gives them the right to police the world?

The fact that the feds are making them erase all the files goes to show that they dont know what they are doing. Theyre only seeing it as a piracy website, and theyre ignoring that its really a filesharing website where people make stuff and share, and store stuff. Feds have become the entertainment business's tools.

There is a difference between seizure and destruction of property. If they intend to destroy it, they clearly do not need it as evidence so at that point there isn't any further need for the seizure. They may not need it as evidence either if they have records of the illegal content being there. When you prosecute a drug dealer, you use his records and transactions as evidence, not the bag of drugs. Your property can be confiscated if it's in your friend's garage during an investigation, but they can't bulldoze the garage and everything in it.

This is a complete overreach and disregard of not just American property, but worldwide property. There has never before been a search and seizure that affects millions of worldwide people. If they destroy that property, it's bound to get some people worked up over it and raise worldwide anti-american sentiments. Why don't we take this kind of initiative when it comes to putting down South/Central American drug smuggling operations?

But its the fault of the citizens for giving the corporations that money and consequently, power. If in one week, 10 million people stopped shopping at Walmart and the executives saw that reflected in their P&L's, they would change their ways in an instant. Capitalism only works like this because its citizens refuse to unite and are content with mediocrity. I think George Carlin said it best. "Americans will remain willfully ignorant of the"...well I can't repeat the rest because of the language, but here's the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5d [...] re=related