‘Cloud Computing’ may become a victim of the War on Internet Piracy™.

Over at Naked Capitalism ‘George Washington’ asks Did the Feds just kill the cloud storage model?

It explores the viability of cloud storage and the entire ‘everything on the ‘Net model, when the PATRIOT Act, and the media moguls piracy obsession means that the US government can rummage through your stuff almost at will, and seize it without notifying you or justifying their actions.

Imagine what you would think if you had put all of your furniture in a mini-storage unit until you found a new apartment, and when it came time to pick it up, there was nothing there but a fence and a sign saying that the entire location had been taken by the DoJ as part of an investigation involving what someone put in another of the hundred units at the business.

If you want it back you’ll have to wait until the case is over, and then sue the government in Federal court – something in the 5 to 10 year range. There is no insurance coverage for this sort of occurrence, so you need to start over from scratch.

Megaupload was an on-line storage location. There is no way of knowing how much of the stuff stored there was illegal, so everything was seized and the site shut down. Customers have no way of accessing their stuff. For all intents and purposes it is gone.

The Internet can give you the ability to access your stuff from anywhere … well, as long as you can connect to the ‘Net, and the site where it is stored hasn’t crashed, and the Feds haven’t seized it, but a lot of the time you can get to it. So, welcome to ‘Cloud Computing’ where all of your stuff can go up in smoke… 😈