To go with your analogy, sure building owners aren't allowed to rent the space back out, but they most certainly not asked to pay for usual water, gas, or electricity bills (because they aren't/shouldn't be being used).
Third parties get f'd in criminal cases all the time. One of the asset seizure stories the WSJ recently covered involved a guy whose cash happened to be in transit with an armored car company. That was, until the companies assets were seized by the feds along with his cash.
Lucky for Kim Dotcom, New Zealand let him get a hold of some of his cash for living expenses. I'm not sure he'd be so lucky in the US. Carpathia probably should have had an insurance policy for this.
Some people have mentioned insurance. Would any policy cover you for a customer being investigated for possibly criminal activity?
The $3.2MM per year is actually sounding a lot more reasonable to keep it up and running.
- if you buy HDDs in these quantities you will get a big discount (50%+)
- they most likely get the HDDs back after the case is finished, but not the electricity bill.
- you have to factor in opportunity costs from not being able to rent out that rackspace.
- I don't even understand how this can be proper evidence if it just hangs around at a private company.
* It's the chain of custody that is important not who keeps it. Most LEOs outsource to various contractors for all types of investigations.
It sounds to me like they are looking for a way to keep their income flowing with servers that they will have a hard time renting out in the near future. In other words, they just got hit with a huge excess of server capacity that they are going to have a hard time renting out short term (and probably longer term as well).
That said, IANAL but I think the interesting thing here is that just making copies of the hard drives is likely not enough from a evidence standpoint. With such a data set there are likely layers of data abstraction software that would be need to be replicated to make any sense of it.