The US government is trying everything it can to stop people from getting their files back

Nov 1, 2012 09:14 GMT  ·  By

The MegaUpload saga continues, as usual. Users hoping to retrieve lost files they stored on MegaUpload, for safekeeping, are going to have to wait for a long time, that's if the judge decides they can retrieve their data.

One Ohio man, Kyle Goodwin, with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sued the government to be able to access his sports videos of which he has no other copies, since his drive crashed right around the time MegaUpload was raided.

MegaUpload's data, currently still stored by Carpathia hosting, on its own dime, has been inaccessible to anyone for almost a year now.

The government wants it destroyed and with it any evidence that may be of use to MegaUpload. The judge has ordered Carpathia to hold on to the data for now, but the government is doing all it can to prevent people from recovering their stuff.

In the case of Kyle Goodwin, the US government argues that, just because he claims he owns the videos, it doesn't mean that he does.

They want Goodwin to prove, with expert witnesses, that he does indeed own the videos in questions and the other files on his account.

They also make the case that some of the files stored by Goodwin are infringing. They believe that the music in the videos was not licensed. What's more, the government says that Goodwin has some music files in there, which seem to be pirated copies.

EFF's Corynne McSherry, Goodwin's attorney, argues that all of this is a diversionary tactic by the government. She also raises the question of how the government got to be so knowledgeable of what Goodwin had stored.

Presumably, the government would need approval to search through Goodwin's private files. Further, she wonders if it's so easy for the government to access the files, why not release them.