14 DAY TRIAL // It's been close to five years since Kim Dotcom's Megaupload was raided and more than 1,100 servers were seized in the United States, as well as 32 in Canada. Now, the Ontario Court of Appeal has decided that the FBI will not be the entity who will access the servers.
Even though quite a bit of time has passed since the big raid took place, an event that quickly reached news all over the globe, the case is pretty much in the same point it was all those years ago.
TorrentFreak points out that Canada became involved in the case about a month before the raids took place. The 32 servers that were located in Toronto have been at the heart of a jurisdiction battle of sorts. The US Department of Justice asked the Minister of Justice to hand out a search warrant authorizing the seizure of the servers.
The warrant was issued by a Superior Court in Ontario back in January. As time passed, the US government asked the Canadian authorities to hand over the hardware, something that they fully intended to do, had Megaupload not protested.
Kim Dotcom's company claimed the servers contained a lot of information irrelevant to the case, but said a forensic examiner could examine them before the local authorities sent them off to the United States. The Canadian court sided with Megaupload on the case.
It was already 2015 by the time the US and Canadian authorities were ordered to find a way to filter out the irrelevant content so it wouldn't affect issues not pertaining to the case. Megaupload once more objected to the proposal and said the FBI shouldn't be involved in the examination of the servers, which is one solution they had come up with.
Another chapter closed
At the end of last week, the Ontario Court of Appeal finally decided to side with Megaupload once more. Basically, if the US authorities want to have the servers examined, this is not going to be done by an FBI team.
"In my view, it is offensive to the appearance of fairness, and specifically the appearance of judicial impartiality, to have an entity closely associated with one of the adversaries provide the judge with the necessary report," the Judge said. "In coming to that conclusion, I make no assumption that the FBI 'clean team' would not comply with whatever conditions the court imposed. My concern is with the appearance of fairness and impartiality."