Will your data in the clouds still yours?

The EFF has published a interesting stories about data stored on Cloud Computing providers.

In the Megaupload case, the EFF represent Mr. Goodwin who want to recover his data hosted at Megaupload whose servers were seized by the FBI.

In this conflict between Mr. Goodwin and the US government, the first just want his own property back and for the second the claimed property is not so clear.

According to the EFF:

The government maintains that Mr. Goodwin lost his property rights in his data by storing it on a cloud computing service.  Specifically, the government argues that both the contract between Megaupload and Mr. Goodwin (a standard cloud computing contract) and the contract between Megaupload and the server host, Carpathia (also a standard agreement), “likely limit any property interest he may have” in his data.

The EFF adds:

This argument isn’t limited in any way to Megaupload — it would apply if the third party host was Amazon’s S3 or Google Apps or or Apple iCloud.

If this position is legally valid, it may weaken players Cloud Computing in U.S. jurisdiction and they will need to quickly change their contracts to clarify data ownership.

At all risks of disaster, outage and downtime that we report regularly, here we have an actual case of legal risk… which is an aspect of resiliency.