Five years later, legal Megaupload data is still trapped on dead servers

Enlarge / Following the Megaupload bust, the feds took more than 1,000 servers belonging to Carpathia Hosting. The servers, now offline in a climate-controlled facility, held more than 25 petabytes of data. (credit: Getty Images)

It's been more than five years since the government accused Megaupload and its founder Kim Dotcom of criminal copyright infringement. While Dotcom himself was arrested in New Zealand, US government agents executed search warrants and grabbed a group of more than 1,000 servers owned by Carpathia Hosting.

That meant that a lot of users with gigabytes of perfectly legal content lost access to it. Two months after the Dotcom raid and arrest, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a motion in court asking to get back data belonging to one of those users, Kyle Goodwin, whom the EFF took on as a client. Goodwin ran OhioSportsNet, and he used Megaupload to store the digital video he recorded of high school sports games. He paid a79.99 ($87.49) for a two-year premium subscription.

Years have passed. The US criminal prosecution of Dotcom and other Megaupload executives is on hold while New Zealand continues with years of extradition hearings. Meanwhile, Carpathia's servers were powered down and are kept in storage by QTS Realty Trust, which acquired Carpathia in 2015.

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