Megaupload.com has been forcibly shut down but its servers are running under the purview of  a vague fate. No one is there to take their claim.
Megaupload has offered to buy the servers from the hosting company, but U.S. prosecutors and others have objected because of concerns over ensuring that the copyrighted movies, television shows and music are not downloaded again.
Lawyers for Megaupload and its executives have said that they want the 1,103 servers preserved and want to mine them to try to find material that could exonerate their clients, who are also fighting extradition from New Zealand and the Netherlands.
The owner of the servers, Carpathia Hosting Inc, wants to either delete the data and re-use it, sell it, or have someone else bear the cost of storing the idle machines. It is costing  them around 37,000 $ per month.
Megaupload, its founder Kim Dotcom and its executives have been charged in one of the largest Internet piracy cases ever brought by prosecutors, who have accused them of flaunting U.S. laws by infringing copyrighted music, movies and TV shows. The company has countered that it was simply an online storage facility and thus not responsible for the content or what users did with it. The companys financial assets have been frozen and its website shuttered.
A lawyer for Megaupload, Ira Rothken, pleaded with OGrady to prevent the data, some 25 million gigabytes, from being deleted and said the company has pledged to use it only for defending the company and executives. ‘Theres no way to unring the bell if this data is lost,’ said Rothken, who had recommended the judge order the parties to try again to reach a compromise.
The lead federal prosecutor on the case against Megaupload, Jay Prabhu, said that forcing the government to take the servers was a ‘massive burden on the government and the taxpayer.’
An added complication to the case has been requests made by some subscribers to Megaupload who had used the service as an online storage facility and have asked that their material be returned.