An Ontario judge has refused a US request for unfettered access to the data on Megaupload servers hosted in Canada. The ruling is another sign that overseas courts are not giving US officials the degree of deference they've grown accustomed to in this case under US law.

Megaupload once had servers around the world, but they were shut down in a coordinated raid on January 19, 2012. In the United States, the government quickly took possession of servers Megaupload had leased from Carpathia Hosting, copied the data they wanted from the hard drives, and then returned the servers to Carpathia. Carpathia has complained it lost thousands of dollars because it was not able to re-allocate these leased servers to another client.

The government wanted similarly unfettered access to the Canadian servers. But Megaupload objected. As Canadian Justice Gladys Pardu described Megaupload's position: "[T]here is an enormous volume of information on the servers... sending mirror image copies of all of this data would be overly broad, particularly in light of the scantiness of the evidence connecting these servers to the crimes alleged by the American prosecutors."

Justice Pardu sided with Megaupload, denying the government's request for full copies of the servers, which she described as "equivalent of that contained on 100 laptop computers." Instead, she ordered the United States and Megaupload to negotiate about which information the government should get access to under court supervision. If the parties are unable to reach an agreement, Justice Pardu herself will make the decision.

There are good reasons to worry about overly broad disclosures of electronically-stored data. When Ohio videographer Kyle Goodwin, who used Megaupload as a backup service, requested the return of files on the servers, the government responded by examining Goodwin's files. It found he had uploaded "music files with MD5 values that matched the hash values of pirated versions of popular music."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Julie Samuels argued that demonstrates "that if users try to get their property back, the government won't hesitate to comb through it to try to find an argument to use against them." Goodwin had not been suspected of any crime, so there was no reason his files should have been subject to scrutiny. The Canadian procedure is meant to ensure that the government only has access to evidence that's relevant to the Megaupload case.

New Zealand courts have also tried to rein in US access to information in the Megaupload case. Last summer, a judge ruled the search warrant used to raid Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's mansion was invalid. Unfortunately, the US had already taken custody of some of Dotcom's hard drives and transferred them to the United States.