MPAA warns Megaupload could set up shop again

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and three of the company’s executives are still waiting to see whether the request for the extradition to the US will be granted by the New Zealand court handling their case.

In the meantime, the MPAA has filed a petition asking the judge presiding over the case in the US to prohibit Carpathia, the Virginia-based hosting service that hosts Megaupload’s servers, to sell them back to the controversial company.

“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,” they claim.

According to the The Hollywood Reporter, Carpathia spends $9,000 per day on keeping the servers in question running, and has previously asked the court for permission to do with them anything that would allow them to nix these costs.

The MPAA countered by saying that they wouldn’t mind if the servers were given over to the US government. They also added that they were sympathetic to the plight of Megaupload’s users who are now unable to access their own data, but that the site’s terms of service stated clearly that such an eventuality was possible.

They would agree for the users to be allowed to access and export their data only if a mechanism for preventing the download of illegal files would be set up.