The Motion Picture Association of America presented its request to the U.S. federal judge, asking to order the company Carpathia, main host in Virgina of the former filesharing giant Megaupload, to keep storing on its servers about 25 petabytes of data, including user account information.
In an interview with “Wired”, Howard Gantman, vice-president of the MPAA, has reassured ex-Megaupload users, specifying that the association would not be starting prosecutions against single users: the retained data would instead only be used to check the involvement of some intermediaries in the illegal activities of Megaupload. The association’s request is motivated by the recent events in the case: the federal authorities, in fact, have already copied – a long time ago- part of the said amount of data to government servers, so to be able to analyze its contents and search for related responsibilities. Carpathia, on the other hand, advocates the removal for reasons of cost (the company claims to spend about $ 9,000 a day to keep the data on their servers). Considering, however, that the government estimates the effects of the case – in terms of damage to copyright holders – of approximately 500 million dollars, the request of the MPAA does not seem excessive at all: after all, Gantman said, the only scope of such data preservation is to focus search for those users with peak utilization of their data capacity for illegal activities, so to reveal their economic gain, or at least their substantial interest in the continuation of Megaupload’s activities, and selectively bring them to face their responsibilities.