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Comment by corin_ | Hacker News Reader

If Megaupload were to win the case, get their domain/money/etc. back, would they be able to seek compensation?

I don't know if they have any chance of winning, but if they did I can't imagine their being able to rescue the company - even if they did, they surely wouldn't have a hard time showing how much damage the downtime did to them financially. What options would they have?

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Proving the lost costs would be a case of saying we made $Z per day and were off line for Y days, Z*Y= lost revenue. Add to that compensation for lost data for end users plus an arbitrarily large figure for lost "goodwill" in the business and punitive damages. Lawyers are good at this sort of sum as they usually get to stick a few 0's on the end of the figure they come up with.

there is no need to compensate end users for lost data as the MU terms of service explicitly ruled out any such compensation...

Only for MU; not from a third party such as the federal government. The ToS is a private contract between MU and their customers. It is completely inapplicable to any issue between their customers and the federal government.

That said, the users will likely never see a dime because the government's sovereign immunity prevents anyone from suing the federal government over damages relating to law enforcement seizing evidence of a crime.

This immunity is what enables the executive branch of the government to abuse this authority and treat seizure as a form of extra-judicial punishment without going through the courts.

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