14 DAY TRIAL // Kim Dotcom is now providing proof that the European hosting company LeaseWeb deleted the data it was holding for Megaupload, despite being asked by Dotcom and his legal team to retain it as evidence in the Megaupload lawsuit.
The hope was to eventually be able to give users back their data as well.
After Dotcom revealed that LeaseWeb deleted the data on 630 servers that Megaupload had been using prior to the raid last year, the hosting company defended itself by saying that Megaupload showed no interest in the data being saved and that it wasn't even contacted by Dotcom's legal team.
So Dotcom has now revealed two emails addressed to LeaseWeb, one sent by Megaupload's US counsel, Ira P. Rothken, and one by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The emails are dated March 10 and April 3, respectively.
In the emails, both Rothken and the EFF plead with LeaseWeb to maintain the data on the servers while Megaupload is working on getting the court to release funds to pay for them and while the EFF works to enable users to get their data back.
That, of course, didn't happen. Instead, LeaseWeb said it notified Rothken that it was reprovisioning the servers in January this year, something that Megaupload's counsel denies.
The hosting company has also responded to Dotcom's new allegations by saying that it did receive the two emails, but Rothken's one came before LeaseWeb stored the servers, on March 29, and it received no emails after it stored the servers, so its initial statement, that it received no request from Megaupload, is still true.
What's more, LeaseWeb says, it was well within its rights to delete the data on the servers and start reusing them since it owned those servers and Megaupload hadn't paid anything for a year.
Australian domain registrar INSTRA contacted LeaseWeb with the intention of buying the stored servers. INSRA is now a major investor in Dotcom's Mega. However, LeaseWeb claims that under European law, it couldn't have transferred the data on the servers to any third-party, including Megaupload users and INSTRA.