Megaupload neergehaald door de FBI #4 Kim Jing Ping Ping

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Op zaterdag 17 maart 2012 18:29 schreef Yuri_Boyka het volgende:
Interview met Kim Dotcom!!!

http://ondemand.tv3.co.nz(...)MCat/73/Default.aspx

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Op zaterdag 17 maart 2012 18:29 schreef Yuri_Boyka het volgende:
Interview met Kim Dotcom!!!

http://ondemand.tv3.co.nz(...)MCat/73/Default.aspx

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Entertainment Industry Was Eager to Work With Megaupload

Considering the aggressive stance taken by the MPAA against Megaupload, one might be forgiven for thinking the Hollywood-backed group and file-hosting service were sworn enemies. But behind the scenes things were quite different, with companies including Disney, Warner Brothers and Fox courting Megaupload to set up content distribution and advertising deals.

“By all estimates, Megaupload.com is the largest and most active criminally operated website targeting creative content in the world,” said the MPAA in a statement issued immediately after Mega was shutdown in January.

As statements go, they don’t get much more harsh than that, so one might think that hostilities between Megaupload and the member companies of the MPAA are a long-standing thing.

But as we know, despite all the rhetoric the likes of the usually-aggressive Disney never sued the Hong Kong based file-hosting service, and instead opted to let the FBI do their work for them.

While this government-financed approach will have proven substantially cheaper than dragging Megaupload through civil court, some potentially embarrassing things would have inevitably come out in such a case – such as this selection of emails just obtained by TorrentFreak.

In an eyebrow-raising email penned by Disney attorney Gregg Pendola, the counsel contacts Megaupload not to threaten or sue the company, but to set up a deal to have Disney content posted on the Megavideo site.

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Megaupload proves users were legit

In light of Megaupload's upcoming court case in which the US Government has accused Megaupload of being a hotbed for illegal users, Mega has proved the majority of it's users were legitimate. Megaupload has released that a large sum of it's users were actually belonging to US Officials including over 15,000 accounts held by US Military. Of the accounts held by US Officials these included accounts held by members of the FBI, Homeland Security, NASA and the Senate.

Megaupload attorney's and users are fighting hard for the data to not be deleted at this time however there is no certainty at this time if the information will be saved.

In other Megaupload news Kim Dotcom and his wife Mona welcome their twin baby girls into the world. The twin girls are reported to be a healthy weight at 5.3 and 6.2lbs however their names have not yet been released.
This is the fourth and fifth children for the couple. While Kim Dotcom is still under house arrest leading up to his extradition case the founder can live comfortably with his $50,000 a month spending limit. When doctor's asked if the couple would like to keep the placenta Kim Dotcom responded "yes, and please send it to the FBI for forensic analysis so they can verify there is no pirate DNA ;-)". If nothing else Megaupload founder has kept his sense of humour.

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Kim Dotcom: The US Government is Wrong, Here’s Why

For the first time since his arrest in January, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is responding to allegations in what he calls the “MPAA-sponsored” indictment. Eager to fight back, Dotcom refutes several “nonsense” claims made by the Government. In addition, he shows that Mega wasn’t a big bad pirate haven, but a legitimate service that may have been shutdown for political reasons.

For a man who’s the main defendant in one of the biggest criminal cases ever brought in the US, Kim Dotcom is surprisingly composed.

The Megaupload founder is convinced of his innocence, and instead of letting fear or anger get to him, he is excited. Deep into the night, Dotcom digs through heaps of paperwork, collecting evidence that shows how he was framed by the US Government.

Talking to TorrentFreak by phone, he gives example after example of why he thinks the indictment twists the truth. While Megaupload’s lawyers are still working on the first motion in response to the indictment, he agreed to exclusively share the first details with us.
Stealing from 50 Cent?

One of the claims of the US Government is that Kim Dotcom personally shared copyrighted files on Megaupload, so-called ‘direct infringement’. He supposedly shared a link to a 50 Cent song, but the indictment fails to include the necessary context.

“A link distributed on December 3, 2006 by defendant DOTCOM links to a musical recording by U.S. recording artist ’50 Cent’. A single click on the link accesses a Megaupload.com download page that allows any Internet user to download a copy of the file from a computer server that is controlled by the Mega Conspiracy,” the indictment reads.

Dotcom told TorrentFreak that the file in question wasn’t infringing at all. He explained that he actually bought that song legally, and that he uploaded the file in private to test a new upload feature. He quickly picked a random file from his computer, which turned out to be this song.

“The link to the song was sent using the private link-email-feature of Megaupload to our CTO with the file description ‘test’. I was merely testing the new upload feature,” Dotcom said.

“The URL to this song had zero downloads. This was a ‘private link’ and it has never been published,” he added.

Aside from the above, Dotcom told us that the US may not even have jurisdiction over the issue. The song was uploaded from a Philippine IP-address to a European server. Also, since the upload occurred in 2006, the statute of limitations renders the evidence unusable.

Dotcom further said that the Louis Armstrong song mentioned in the indictment wasn’t an infringement either.

“I also bought the Louis Armstrong song that was sent to me by a co-defendant via the private link-email-feature of Megaupload. According to the Department of Justice I am an infringer, and this is all they got? One song?”

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Mega has become a re-election pawn in the White House / MPAA affair. If I was a Republican presidential candidate I would investigate this, Dotcom says.

However, this gift isnt as free as it may seem. Dotcom says that the witch hunt against his company is putting the US technology sector at a disadvantage.

The MPAA / White House corruption has weakened US technology leadership. Internet businesses, hosting, cloud, payment processors, ad networks, etc. are going to avoid the US, Dotcom told TorrentFreak.

There is an opportunity for liberal countries to welcome those businesses with better laws, he predicts. The loss of IT business & jobs in the US will substantially outweigh the inflated losses claimed by the MPAA & their billionaire club.

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The MPAA / White House corruption has weakened US technology leadership. Internet businesses, hosting, cloud, payment processors, ad networks, etc. are going to avoid the US

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Megaupload user asks for his perfectly legal videos back

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a brief on behalf of an Ohio man in a federal court case brought by the United States against Kim Dotcom, founder and owner of the file-sharing locker Megaupload. The brief requested that Kyle Goodwin, and users like him, be allowed access to the files they had stored on the currently shuttered site.

Goodwin is a local high school sports reporter and the sole proprietor of the company OhioSportsNet, who stored his video footage on Megaupload.com as a backup to his video library on his hard drive. He had paid ¤79.99 (about $107) for a two-year premium membership. Just days before the government seized the site, Goodwin's hard drive crashed. The brief states that his lost videos include footage to make highlight reels for parents to send to their children's prospective colleges, and an unfinished full-length documentary about the Strongsville girls soccer team’s season.

While there is no way of telling how many Megaupload users like Goodwin stored legal files on the site, he is one of millions of users who can no longer access any of the information they stored there.

When the Feds shut down the file-sharing locker earlier this year, they seized more than 1,000 servers that Megaupload was leasing from hosting company Carpathia, including 525 servers in Virginia alone. Government authorities have been using the servers in the investigation of Dotcom and his company. Earlier this week, Carpathia announced that the 25 petabytes of Megaupload data stored on its servers have been costing the company $9,000 a day, and Megaupload has no way of paying its bills with its assets frozen.

According to the EFF, authorities told Carpathia that after it was done examining the servers and had copied portions of the data, the hosting company could delete the files and re-purpose its servers. Carpathia noted in a statement last week that it would like to allow Megaupload users to recover their data, but has struggled to find a way to do so.

"Despite our best efforts, the parties have been unable to work out a voluntary solution that meets the concerns of all the various parties who have claimed an interest in Megaupload’s data," Brian Winter, Chief Marketing Officer of Carpathia Hosting wrote. "As a result, Carpathia has filed a motion in federal court seeking the court’s guidance on how to proceed in resolving this matter." A hearing concerning this matter is set for next month.

The interests of Goodwin brought by the EFF represent the concerns of the millions of users who now can't access their data. “Mr. Goodwin files this brief in support of Carpathia’s Motion for Protective Order and requests that the Court implement a procedure to expedite the return of his rightful property, as well as the property of others similarly situated, stored on Megaupload’s servers,” the court document read, “The government itself created the problem of an overbroad seizure by utilizing a method that predictably encompasses innocent property.”

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It is no secret that the MPAA was a main facilitators of the criminal investigation against Megaupload. But while the movie studios have praised the actions of the US Government, they are not satisfied yet. Paramount Pictures vice president for worldwide content protection identified Fileserve, MediaFire, Wupload, Putlocker and Depositfiles as prime targets that should be shuttered next.

The file-hosting business has been in a permanent state of chaos since the Megaupload shutdown in January. Many sites were quick to remove their affiliate programs and some went as far as blocking visitors from the US entirely.

Its clear that site owners are concerned that their business might become a target, and if its up to the major movie studios this fear is justified. We continue to make criminal referrals, Paramount Pictures Alfred Perry said during the On Copyright conference in New York yesterday.

CNET reports that the Paramount Pictures produced a list of five rogue file-hosters, presented in a fancy graphic where Megaupload is crossed out. The prime targets on this shutdown list are Fileserve, MediaFire, Wupload, Putlocker and Depositfiles.

The movie studio claims that these rogue cyberlockers receive 41 billion page views a year, which translates to five views for every person on the planet.

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US government: We hear there's child porn on those Megaupload servers, judge!

Carpathia Hosting, which owns over 600 servers leased by Megaupload before the government shut down the file-sharing site, has a problem: those servers are worth serious money, but no one is paying the bills.

Megaupload wants the servers back to help with its defense, but with most of its assets seized by the federal government, it can't pay for them. Carpathia would normally wipe the servers and lease them to new clients, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation is demanding that legitimate users of the site be allowed to retrieve their personal data first. The Motion Picture Association of America doesn't want this to happen without assurances that its copyrighted content won't be retrieved and distributed again; besides, it might want the servers for a future lawsuit of its own. And the federal government yesterday announced that the servers “may contain child pornography,” which would render them "contraband" and limit Carpathia's options for dealing with them.

Carpathia originally housed the servers in a Virginia warehouse on which the government executed a search warrant back on January 19. After making forensic copies of selected servers, the government withdrew. Megaupload couldn't pay the bills, so Carpathia says it spent $9,000 a day in rent to house the servers it couldn't reuse. This quickly got expensive, so Carpathia trucked all the servers (at a cost, it says, of $65,000) and stuck them in some empty space it had in one of its own facilities. Now, stuck with all these servers, Carpathia wants a judge to compensate it for all the money it could be making.

The US government insists that the court has no real jurisdiction over the server issue. In a filing made late yesterday, the government argued that the EFF had highlighted an "unfortunate" situation, but one not before the court (even Megaupload's terms of service warned users not to count on the site as a sole repository for files). As for the MPAA, it hasn't even filed a civil lawsuit yet, and courts should not rule on "speculative matters affecting civil lawsuits that have not yet been filed (and may not be filed at all)." As for Carpathia's request for cash, the government suggests it doesn't deserve any. After all, it's free to wipe and re-lease the servers; the government already has its forensic evidence. The entire dispute is merely a "private contractual matter."

Well, sort of. When it comes to selling or renting the servers back to Megaupload—there the government draws the line. It doesn't want the servers to leave the court's jurisdiction and it worries that they could be used for criminal activity. In addition, "the government recently learned from multiple sources that the Carpathia Servers may contain child pornography, rendering the Carpathia servers contraband."

So Carpathia sits on its servers and waits for the judge's order it has requested. Simply wiping the servers could expose Carpathia to angry rightsholders who want the evidence for cases they intend to file, and to angry Megaupload users whose data would be gone for good. But keeping the hundreds of machines idle costs money, and transferring them to Megaupload—the only interested buyer—may not be possible.

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Kim Dotcom Lashes Out Against “Corrupt” US Government

The US judge handling the Megaupload case noted today that it may never be tried due to a procedural error, a comment that has sparked the anger of Megaupload’s founder. Kim Dotcom is furious with the US Government for destroying his businesses and rendering hundreds of people unemployed. According to Dotcom the case is the result of “corruption on the highest political level, serving the interests of the copyright extremists in Hollywood.”

Earlier today the news broke that a Megaupload trial may never happen because the US Government failed to serve the now defunct file-hosting company.

While some defendants might respond with relief upon hearing such news, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is only becoming more furious at the people who destroyed his businesses.

“The US government has terminated Megaupload, Megavideo and 10 other subsidiaries, including a company called N1 Limited that was developing a clothing line,” Dotcom told TorrentFreak.

“They destroyed 220 jobs. Millions of legitimate Mega users have no access to their files.”

If Judge O’Grady is to be believed all this damage could very well have been for nothing because the authorities simply can’t serve foreign companies. This could lead one to wonder whether the whole setup was to simply destroy Mega’s businesses.

This is certainly a theory Dotcom subscribes to, and it’s not the only dirty trick Megaupload’s founder believes the US Government is playing. The US is structurally denying Megaupload the chance to put up a fair fight.

“We are refused access to the evidence that clears us, we are refused funds to pay our lawyers, we are refused to pick the lawyers we want to represent us and have any chance for a fair trial,” Dotcom says.

For Megaupload the worst part is that the damage can’t be undone. The site has been completely destroyed as well as the plans to become a publicly traded company.

“We have already been served a death sentence without trial and even if we are found ‘not guilty’ which we will, the damage can never be repaired,” Dotcom says.

And why?

According to Megaupload’s founder it is quite clear that the Mega investigation was a ‘gift’ to Hollywood, facilitated by corrupt forces.

“This Mega takedown was possible because of corruption on the highest political level, serving the interests of the copyright extremists in Hollywood,” he says. “Mega has become a re-election pawn.”

Nevertheless, Dotcom is confident that these forces will eventually be exposed.

“It is just a matter of time until the truth comes out. We are working on that and we are making good progress,” Dotcom concludes.

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Op zaterdag 21 april 2012 12:30 schreef PiRANiA het volgende:

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http://torrentfreak.com/k(...)s-government-120420/

Zieke shit.

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Op zaterdag 21 april 2012 13:49 schreef Blue_Panther_Ninja het volgende:

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Nee hoor,volgens de rechter zal MU rechtszaak waarschijnlijk niet meer voorkomen door al deze gedoe.

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Megaupload Prosecution Is Lawless and Unconstitutional, Law Professor Says

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Yet another law expert has slammed the US Government’s decision to launch a criminal case against Megaupload. Law Professor Eric Goldman argues that the Megaupload prosecution is a “depressing display of abuse of government authority” that ignores basic constitutional rights in order to protect private commercial interests.

In recent months many people have been baffled by the US Government’s decision to shutdown and prosecute Megaupload.

While the Department of Justice proudly presented the case as one of the biggest criminal cases ever brought in the US, critics claim the Government has gone too far.

Many law experts agree with this assessment and point out that Megaupload is a lot less guilty than portrayed by the authorities.

This weekend Eric Goldman, a Prof. at Santa Clara University School of Law, joined in with his comments. His attack on the US Government is scathing, describing the Megaupload prosecution as a “depressing display of abuse of government authority.”

Siding with Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom who lashed out against the Government earlier, the Prof. claims that the shutdown of the world’s most popular cyberlocker was a gift to the entertainment industry.

“The government’s prosecution of Megaupload demonstrates the implications of the government acting as a proxy for private commercial interests. The government is using its enforcement powers to accomplish what most copyright owners haven’t been willing to do in civil court,” Goldman writes.

“The revolving door between government and the content industry” and the “Obama administration’s desire to curry continued favor and campaign contributions from well-heeled sources,” are the main motivations Goldman cites.

According to the Professor, Megaupload should have never been taken offline. He claims that it’s a modern-day equivalent of the printing press.

“Megaupload’s website is analogous to a printing press that constantly published new content. Under our Constitution, the government can’t simply shut down a printing press, but that’s basically what our government did when it turned Megaupload off and seized all of the assets.”

“Not surprisingly, shutting down a printing press suppresses countless legitimate content publications by legitimate users of Megaupload,” Goldman adds.

In addition, by shutting the site down and arguing that all data can be destroyed, the authorities are destroying evidence and ignoring the constitutional rights of the millions of US citizens who stored data on Megaupload.

“The government’s further insistence that all user data, even legitimate data, should be destroyed is even more shocking. Destroying the evidence not only screws over the legitimate users, but it may make it impossible for Megaupload to mount a proper defense. It’s depressing our government isn’t above such cheap tricks in its zeal to win.”

Professor Goldman continues by pointing out that the Government has to prove “willful infringement” when they want to hold Megaupload accountable for the infringements of its users. This is going to hard, he argues, as Megaupload has several strong potential defenses.

“Whether it actually qualified for these is irrelevant; Megaupload’s subjective belief in these defenses should destroy the wilfulness requirement. Thus, the government is simply making up the law to try to hold Megaupload accountable for its users’ uploading/downloading,” Goldman writes.

In his closing arguments, Professor Goldman points out that actions like the Megaupload prosecution will only make the public more skeptical about the Government’s attempts to control the Internet on behalf of a few multi-billion dollar companies.

“In the end, the Megaupload prosecution demonstrates that SOPA advocates are inevitably going to win. The content owners’ ire toward ‘foreign rogue websites’ combined with the administration’s willingness to break the law, if necessary, to keep content owners happy, leads to lawless outcomes like the Megaupload prosecution and ICE’s domain name seizures,” he concludes.

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Op woensdag 30 mei 2012 19:22 schreef PiRANiA het volgende:
Megaupload Wins Crucial Evidence Disclosure Battle With US Govt. http://bit.ly/JulElc

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Op woensdag 30 mei 2012 19:57 schreef wolfrolf het volgende:
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Fantastisch nieuws. Fuck die corrupte door de film en muziek industrie omgekochte Amerikaanse overheid.

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Op woensdag 30 mei 2012 20:00 schreef PiRANiA het volgende:

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Denk dat het doel downtime was. Megaupload is praktisch om zeep gehoplen op deze manier. Dat is ze mooi gelukt.

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Megaupload has no rights? US broke its own rules by going after Internet giant

More than four months after federal agents shut-down the file-sharing service Megaupload and ordered a raid on the New Zealand mansion of its founder Kim Dotcom, attorneys are asking a US court to dismiss the case against the website.

Ira Rothken, the California-based attorney of both Megaupload.com and Dotcom, is calling for a US federal court in Virginia to dismiss the criminal case against the website. According to Rothken, the website’s Fifth Amendment rights were violated when the FBI ordered for Megaupload to be taken off the Internet earlier this year. As a result of the agency’s demands, Megaupload’s servers were seized and millions of files uploaded to the website — including those owned by paying subscribers — were made unavailable and are still inaccessible today. Now Rothken says that the prosecutors in the case failed to guarantee due process for his clients and is asking the court to dismiss the charges. Since Megaupload was hosted overseas, argues the site’s attorney, the Department of Justice has acted improperly in its attempts to prosecute.

“Both prongs of the procedural due process test are plainly met here. The Government has seized Megaupload’s property and domain name, ruined its reputation and destroyed its business pursuant to an indictment which is fatally flawed as a jurisdictional matter. Megaupload now finds itself in a state of abeyance, with no end in sight,” writes Rothken in a newly released statement.

“As a result of the Government’s inability to properly serve the summons on Megaupload, this Court lacks jurisdiction over the company. In the absence of effective service of process, criminal proceedings against Megaupload cannot commence, and as the Court has aptly noted, we ‘frankly don’t know that we are ever going to have a trial in this matter’.”

Indeed, those were the words US District Court Judge Liam O'Grady had for the case in April, when the proceedings against Megaupload were already three months old yet grossly underdeveloped. Rothken condemned the court system at the time for failing to properly play by the rules by opening a case against Megaupload and Dotcom over copyright infringement and other related crimes by seizing the website without first bringing charges against it. Last month Judge O’Grady even warned the FBI that the trial was in jeopardy because the Justice Department jumped the gun on the case.

In an interview with Radio New Zealand last week, Rothken added, "We're optimistic that the case against Megaupload will be dismissed” and called the entire federal witch-hunt “flawed.”

"Megaupload is a Hong Kong corporation, it does not have an office in the United States and we're just asking the US to play by the rules," said Rothken. "One would think that they'd have done more legal research before filing this type of indictment against a foreign corporation."

Speaking to AFP, Rothken added, "The rules in this instance didn't allow a foreign corporation to be served and indicted as it has not have a presence in the US. We believe the law is clear in that issue, and we're asking the court to dismiss the case."

Dotcom, a German national, is currently under house-arrest in New Zealand. American prosecutors are hoping to extradite him for charges relating to his involvement with Megaupload though have been unable to do as much so far. A court hearing scheduled for the matter is slated for this August. In the meantime, though, his attorney says that the shortcuts that the US government tried to take in the case might very well cost the court a victory.

"This case was flawed from the start, once this case gets dismissed it can't be fixed,” Rothken added to the radio network.

Dotcom previously told the website Torrent Freak that he predicts he will prevail over America’s attempt at prosecuting him but that the government has already made their point.

“We have already been served a death sentence without trial and even if we are found ‘not guilty’ which we will, the damage can never be repaired,” said Dotcom.

Rothken adds this week, “Megaupload is thus deprived of any procedure to clear its name or recoup its property, in clear violation of its due process rights.”

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Op dinsdag 5 juni 2012 18:29 schreef wolfrolf het volgende:
Hhahaha

En met de naamsbekendheid die MU nu heeft, als ze de toko weer online zouden zetten... whooaaaa

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FBI Did Not Steal Megaupload Evidence Because It’s “Digital”?

In New Zealand Dotcom’s legal team continues the battle over data that was seized from his home.

Dotcom’s lawyer Mr. Akel argues that the FBI illegally copied data from his computers, to send it to the U.S.

“The first [copies] were sent without the New Zealand Police having any say in it whatsoever,” he said quoted by Stuff.

“If [they] went offshore without the consent of the attorney-general, it was an illegal act.”

However, according to Crown’s lawyer, no harm was done because the evidence in question is “not physical” and therefore not covered by the relevant legislation.

“[Information] may be the most valuable thing we have, but it is not scooped up by the act,” he said. “Nothing of the physical items have gone overseas and that was our undertaking.”

A strange but interesting argument, since the entire case against Megaupload is built on evidence that’s not physical.

Whether Judge Winkelmann will agree with this argument has yet to be seen.

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Op zondag 10 juni 2012 10:36 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Zie je wel, kopiëren en delen is geen stelen.

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Feds Tell Megaupload Users to Forget About Their Data

Federal authorities say they may shut down cloud-storage services without having to assist innocent customers in retrieving data lost in the process.

The government is making that argument in the case of Megaupload, the file-sharing service that was shuttered in January following federal criminal copyright-infringement indictments targeting its operators.

The Obama administration is telling an Ohio man seeking the return of his company’s high school sports footage that he should instead be suing Megaupload — even though the government seized Megaupload’s assets in January.

The filing (.pdf) comes as cloud-based storage services are becoming more and more popular — despite there being little clarity about what’s legal and what’s not — and who’s to blame if copyright infringement happens on a service. Even Apple announced enhancements Monday to its iCloud storage service.

Assisting former Megaupload customer Kyle Goodwin “would create a new and practically unlimited cause of action on behalf of any third party who can claim that the government’s execution of a search warrant adversely impacted a commercial relationship between the target of the search and the third party,” the authorities wrote the judge overseeing the prosecution.

As first reported by CNET, the government noted that Megaupload had 66.6 million users and that its seizure didn’t include the data O’Grady is seeking.

Though the authorities seized 25 petabytes of data, that was not all of Megaupload’s data. Megaupload rented more than 1,100 servers from hosting provider Carpathia — though the servers are of little use after the feds seized all of Megaupload’s domain names. The government says it doesn’t care what happens to the rest of the data, and has said Carpathia can erase it if it chooses.

“The government also does not oppose access by Kyle Goodwin to the 1,103 servers previously leased by Megaupload. But access is not the issue – if it was, Mr. Goodwin could simply hire a forensic expert to retrieve what he claims is his property and reimburse Carpathia for its associated costs,” the government wrote in a brief filing Friday. “The issue is that the process of identifying, copying, and returning Mr. Goodwin’s data will be inordinately expensive, and Mr. Goodwin wants the government, or Megaupload, or Carpathia, or anyone other than himself, to bear the cost.”

Goodwin is the owner of a startup called OhioSportsNet, which films and streams high school sports. He stored his copyrighted footage on the file-sharing network, and he has no backups as his hard drive crashed days before the government shuttered the site on Jan. 19. He is the only Megaupload customer to come forward in court seeking return of files.

But Goodwin’s lawyer, staff attorney Julie Samuels of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the government’s methods of prosecution of online copyright infringement means there will be more Goodwins in the future.

“As more and more consumers move their data to the cloud, and as the government continues its campaign to seize whole websites without regard for third-party property residing on those sites, it’s clear that we need a better solution. We hope the court will help us get there,” said Samuels.

Megaupload allowed users to upload large files and share them with others, but the feds and Hollywood allege the service was used almost exclusively for sharing copyrighted material — which Megaupload denies.

The criminal prosecution of Megaupload targets seven individuals connected to the Hong Kong-based file-sharing site, including founder Kim Dotcom. They were indicted in January on a variety of charges, including criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Five members of what the authorities called a 5-year-old “racketeering conspiracy,” including Dotcom, have been arrested in New Zealand and are pending possible extradition to the United States.

The government said the site, which generated hundreds of millions in user fees and advertising, facilitated copyright infringement of music, television programs, electronic books, business and entertainment software, and, perhaps most damningly, movies, often before their theatrical release. The government said Megaupload’s “estimated harm” to copyright holders was “well in excess of $500 million.”

Carpathia said it is spending $9,000 daily to retain the Megaupload data, and is demanding that Judge Liam O’Grady relieve it of that burden. Megaupload, meanwhile, wants the government to free up some of the millions in dollars of seized Megaupload assets to be released to pay Carpathia to retain the data for its defense and possibly to return data to its customers — a proposition which the government rejects.