Megaupload Files of foreign customers are lost

As you may recall, the MPAA is among those who have said that Carpathia, the hosting company Megaupload used, must retain the data on its servers -- even though the Justice Department has said it's done with it and Carpathia was free to delete the evidence. Others, of course have also asked for access to their data. And, most importantly, Megaupload itself has asked if it can keep the data. Carpathia wants nothing to do with it, because it's costing the company $9,000 per day to hang onto the servers without doing anything else with them.

However, in response to all of this, the MPAA has again gone to the court to suggest that if Carpathia gave the content to anyone else, that alone would represent copyright infringement.

The sale or transfer of those copies from Carpathia to Megaupload or any other third party would constitute an unauthorized "distribut[ion] ... to the public" under the Copyright Act

That seems like a pretty big legal stretch by the MPAA's typically overreaching lawyers. Depending on who the content was transferred to, it doesn't automatically mean distribution "to the public."

Of course, the continued insane paranoia of the MPAA continues to shine through in this filing as well. It insists that if Megaupload is given back the servers, it will ship them to some other jurisdiction and immediately relaunch the site:

"A sale or transfer of the servers to Megaupload (or any of the defendants) would raise a significant risk that Megaupload will simply ship the servers, hard drives or other equipment -- and all of the infringing content they contain -- to a foreign jurisdiction and relaunch the infringing Megaupload service, which would result in untold further infringements of the MPAA members’ copyrighted works. If so, the renewed criminal enterprise might be beyond any effective legal remedy."

This also seems like a reach. All of the principles are under arrest and facing extradition to the US where they'll face criminal charges. One would imagine they all recognize that it doesn't do their case any good to set the site up again in another jurisdiction.