Will the Megaupload Case Impact Cloud-Based Ownership Rights?

By David Tobia
November 14, 2012

The lawsuit against Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom not only has the chance to impact his life — but the lives, privacy and property rights of anyone in the world that uses cloud storage, suggests Wired.
Even if the legal system rules that the government should return the seized data, it would first have to be screened to determine if it violated copyright law, according to Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Julie Samuels.
Samuels advocates for user rights in relation to cloud storage. “There has to be something to allow third parties to get their data,” she notes. “These are important property rights. If we don’t treat them as such, we’re doing third parties a disservice. These are new issues. More and more people are using cloud technology every day.”
The process that federal prosecutors have proposed “would make it essentially impossible for former Megaupload users to recover any of their legitimate data,” writes Wired.
The prosecutors proposed the method because they maintain that the site was used almost exclusively for the illegal sharing of files. Others argue that while the site may have been used primarily for this purpose, some people stored legitimate data on the site.
“A hearing on the data-retrieval issue is pending,” notes the article.

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