Without their permission you're right, but if they sought permission from those accused they might well agree to it, in which case it would no longer be immoral - no idea about legal status, if both the prosecutors and prosecuted want to do it.

Why they would agree to it - if convicted they lose that money anyway, if found not guilty, by paying for the servers now they will still have all their data if they decide to get the site back online and resume business as normal.

I suspect a Judge could just order the data hosts to retain the data, or seize it as evidence through an order to transfer it.

I would guess that would depend where the hosting resides. If the host is non-US then it is out of the courts jurisdiction.

You need to think about the cost to the hosting company. I assume they are holding a lot of data and a large number of servers are tied up doing nothing without payment. They have every right to clean the server and allocate it elsewhere.

If anyone should be footing the bill it should be the prosecutors themselves. They can't take it from MegaUpload. The defense shouldn't pay for it as the data may actually damage their case. You would expect them to be in a stronger position with the proof gone.

You also need to think about the damage to the company. I am sure the prosecutors think they have a slam-dunk but what if they loose? They would have effectively destroyed a multi-million dollar company as a result of a failed prosecution. You could expect a fairly large compensation package in this scenario.

That's the problem with the shoot-first-ask-later approach that they have pursued. I'm positive they did not think this through all possible ramifications and now they are left with a great big mess on their hands.

I think their real goal was to destroy MU. If the case happened to go away in the process, that might even be better, since you wouldn't have to worry about pesky precedence being set. If the government can blame the case going away on somebody else, they might be able to duck any civil consequences in the process (IANAL). They may have thought this through very well.

One reason this may be patently false is that I'm sure Hollywood would love to see people put in jail for copyright infringement.

I, on the other hand believe that officials had to have IT specialists to tell them about the cost to keep the storage running.