With evidence against Megaupload problems: hard drives with service files are gradually becoming unreadable

In the long epic, with the closure of the file-sharing service Megaupload and the flight of its owner Kim Dotcom from American justice to New Zealand, a curious episode appeared. Cogent, the hosting company responsible for storing files for MegaUpload, informed the federal court in Virginia that eight of the sixteen hard drives with “pirated files” were unreadable. Five years have passed since the arrest of the service, some of the FBI files were copied onto their media, and the rest of the archive Cogent is obliged to keep on its own. The data is not lost completely, but since for all the time those who wanted to access the files were not found, the hoster does not want to waste their time and money on maintaining the performance of the disks.

A little earlier , an agreement between lawyers MegaUpload and copyright holders (Motion Picture Association of America, MPAA) was reported . The latter agreed to postpone consideration of the claim to the file sharing service for six months if the service agrees to provide MPAA with a copy of the data stored at the Cogent hoster. However, MegaUpload lawyers refused to do this, citing the fact that these data belong to the users and disclosing them to a third party would violate confidentiality. As a result, no concrete decision was made, and the consideration of the case has not yet begun.

The founder of MegaUpload itself is also quite at risk. All this time from living in New Zealand, whose court considered the FBI request for the extradition of Dotcom to the United States and declared it lawful. True, the lawyers have promised to file an appeal. At the same time, Kim Dotkom himself admitted to journalists that the trial about MegaUpload had a serious impact on his financial situation, but at the same time he managed to announce the release of the MegaChat messenger with support for encryption and video calls.