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Data most certainly is property, just not physical property. For example: I keep PDF files of most of my financial transactions, as I've learned in the past how fragile and delicate paper records can be. Say I upload my financial documents to box.net, and three weeks later the government seizes that domain. I just lost access to my papers, as in "...secure in papers, effects..." and am likely to lose them forever.

From a different perspective: When our computer forensics team has to process digital evidence, they are required to make every effort to preserve the original data intact so it may be returned to the suspect or victim to comply with constitutional rights. This is at the local law enforcement level, of course, not the federal government. How's that for irony?

In Australia law enforcement agencies are not even allowed to directly examine data on storage media. They must first clone the disk and then examine the cloned data.

AdamW,

"Data is not property. A hard disk is property. Store your data on someone else's hard disk, you can't expect to assert property rights over it."

I don't know the details, but do you know for a fact that MegaUpload's servers weren't taken? I still think there could be a legitimate constitutional concern if they were. After all, they are private property (in the real physical sense). And the owners may have very well had contractual obligations in place with customers to hold their data. Who's responsible when the government come around to haul the equipment away?

I don't know the legal answer, but I think it would set a terrible precedent if the government could take over service provider's equipment without regards to their user rights.

Data most certainly is property, however, as with any other property (physical or otherwise) you should exercise care in where you store it. If you store any of your property in a way over which you have no control, you can't expect to be able to complain if something happens to it. You wouldn't keep your only precious airloom at a friend's house, so why would you keep the only copy of your data on a place like Megaupload, or any other cloud for that matter? Always retain backups of your own data that are under your soul control. The cloud is an excellent convenience, but should by no means be treated as a one-stop secure storage area for all of your files. Use it by all means to make your life easier, but always remember that you are not in control of that storage and are subject to the whims of third parties and so are any files you may elect to store there.

>>>>>This is the absurd thing about US law - it's one rule for the corporations and another rule for everyone else.

You've really hit the nail on the head. If you're a US corporation, we'll pass SOPA or PIPA or ACTA to protect your digital data, whereas if you're an individual, you lose your data without due process.

Your one sentence really clarifies this whole issue.

Facebook, Google all all governments, would argue that data is in fact property, and all the data they've collected on you they own.