14 DAY TRIAL // Megaupload is fighting the US government once more, and this time it’s against a sealed court order which allows them to share evidence from the Megaupload case with copyright owners.
Kim Dotcom’s legal team believes this will create issues for former users of the service and damage the jury pool, Torrent Freak reports.
Despite the fact that the case has been around for several months, during which time nothing really happened, Dotcom’s legal team discovered that a secret order allowed the US government to share evidence critical to the case with groups inside the copyright industry, the ones that put in so much money for lobbying efforts.
It seems that among the data that got shared is the MD5 hash value of Megaupload users’ files.
Lawyers claim that there is no real valid reason for the order to be filed so secretively and to be kept away from Megaupload. “The defendants have been indicted, their assets have been frozen, their business has been destroyed, and their liberty has been restrained. Given these constraints, it is unclear what evils the Government fears defendants will inflict if provided notice of the Government’s submission, beyond having Defendants’ counsel come into court to make opposing arguments,” reads a letter sent to the court by Dotcom’s team.
Not only is the order questionable in itself, but its purpose seems to be to aid copyright holders file civil lawsuits against Megaupload and Kim Dotcom for whatever copyrighted content the service’s users were sharing.
The case against Megaupload has had quite a bit of bumps. First, the raid on Dotcom’s house back in 2012 was illegal, as admitted by authorities, then the case files the US government had on Megaupload and its leader got locked, leaving Dotcom’s team in the dark about what kind of evidence the US might have.
Furthermore, Dotcom accused the US government of having a hand in the destruction of the data found on over 1,100 servers that got wiped out without warning earlier this year.