Dotcom Case: The Evidence Is Deteriorating In Storage, Server Discs Need Repairing

Four years after MegaUpload was shuttered following a violent raid on the New Zealand mansion of German national Kim Dotcom, his woes continue. According to reports in Torrent Freak, accusations of infringement are still being referred to Google (as reported on Lumen) even though they are provably false and the evidence that might exonerate him is deteriorating in the ageing servers. You'd think that the answer would be to copy the information but

 a) there's a lot of it
 b) the costs are prohibitive since Dotcom has limited access to funds due to court actions so can't pay for the copying himself
 c) there are privacy implications (not to mention the risk of tampering with the evidence) if the MPAA and RIAA were permitted to attend to this themselves
 d) it has yet to be decided who will pay for this

so District Court Judge Liam O’Grady has agreed with the defendants' suggestion that hosting company Cogent repair the drives. Meanwhile, Kim Dotcom is awaiting the outcome of his appeal, which is due to be heard later on this summer.

If the data is allowed to be lost because no one can be bothered to pay to preserve it, will the extradition proceedings, which were always on shaky ground, proceed, or will the US government just quietly drop the case?