Carpathia Hosting, the Virginia company that owns more than 600 servers previously leased by Megaupload, today joined forces with the EFF to collect the stories of legitimate users who want access to their now-inaccessible files stored with the defunct file-locker.

The new site, megaretrieval.com, hopes to hear from the "multitude of innocent users who stored legitimate, non-infringing files on the cloud-storage service were left with no means to access their data." EFF can't promise that the data will be retrieved, though, and Carpathia says it has no direct access to the content on the servers.

"Carpathia does not have access to any data for Megaupload customers," wrote Brian Winter of Carpathia. "We have no immediate plans to reprovision some or all of the Megaupload servers. This means that there is no imminent data loss for Megaupload customers. If this situation changes, we will post a notice at least 7 days in advance of reprovisioning any Megaupload servers at www.Carpathia.com and www.MegaRetrieval.com."

Megaupload servers were searched and the company's employees arrested, mainly in New Zealand, on January 19. The FBI did not physically seize the servers, however; after executing its warrants and copying data, the Bureau released them for use again by Carpathia. But with Megaupload's assets also seized, the site can't currently pay to keep them running.

Julie Samuels of EFF says that her organization is "troubled that so many lawful users of Megaupload.com had their property taken from them without warning and that the government has taken no steps to help them. We think it's important that these users have their voices heard as this process moves forward."

Our own Peter Bright suspects that the percentage of legal content hosted on Megaupload is minimal. At the moment, though, it's hard to know; we've already chronicled some of the many legal uses to which the site was put.

A major part of the EFF/Carpathia initiative is simply finding out more about these uses and how widespread they were.