next up sue the power company who's electricity facilitated and enabled copyright infringement... the land holder who harboured copyright infringes... then the local government who provided services to copyright infringer's... then the state government who knowingly collected revenue and who who turned a blind eye to the actions of local government thereby facilitating copyright infringement... all the way up to the federal government who can sue itself ensuring that this lucrative little enterprise of the copyright legal mafia stays on the taxpayer funded gravy train... protecting American jobs!
I hate to state the obvious, but an analogy that might be communicable to the knuckle heads working for the prosecution: Suing the hosting company would be the equivalent to suing a roads authority for people speeding on highways.
To delete the contents on the servers, or not to delete... I hope they won't but, heck, the US Government doesn't seem to mind if they do.. But if they do, where's the evidence?! You can't really sue people from screenshots, surely? This whole Megaupload case is just one big joke all together.
I don't see anyone bring prosecuted for the "weapons of mass destruction" lies that led to the deaths of many thousands of people, so I don't think having evidence is too important.
A) These lies came from the government. I know, this shouldn't make any difference, but sadly, it does.
B) The WMA case you mention is different - there is no evidence in that case, indeed. However, there is evidence that illegal files are hosted on the MU servers. Unless, they decide to delete it.. In which case, it'd be the same, agreed. And even if there are illegal files on the server, the US government has a law in place that should protect them from this kind of bullshit - they can force them to delete the files with DMCA notices - if they don't respond to them, then they're in fault...
Why don't Carpathia just backup the data? I know it's a lot of work and data, but burning 10.000 blurays (or other backup media) probably costs fairly less than 9.000$ per day.
There's nothing 'just' about backuping 25 petabytes of data. Even taking the ridiculous idea of burning it on blu-rays/dvds, for which I don't even want to think about manpower and hardware costs (do you expect their servers to have bluray burners?), the raw disks would cost, at say 50 pence per 25GB disk, 500k, and burning the 1000000 disks using 100 blu-ray equipped servers would take ~500 hours. All the while someone has to shuffle the disks every half an hour.
Oh, and then you have to store them somewhere.
Even tape storage would be extremely expensive for this, which is why Carpathia is asking for assistance.
