Sadly, I simply cannot agree. I absolutely understand Marco's desire to focus on developing Instapaper, but there's quite a bit more at stake here, and his willingness to move on without even a bit of protest is concerning.

He claims that there's nothing that can be done, but there are definitely legal actions one can take in this scenario. Sure, they might not ever fully compensate him, nor convince the skeptics, but it will at least reveal the details behind the seizure, and it will send a message to both the FBI and to others like DigitalOne that could prevent further "seize first and ask questions later" style operations.

So for a one-man software shop, given the choice between:

a) Spend money and time on legal action against the FBI for holding onto his servers for a couple of days while in the process of an investigation, in order to hopefully try and make a larger point.

and

b) Spending his time and no money by actually improving his bottom line by enhancing the features of his software,

you expect any rational person to choose (a) ?

Sorry, but the suggestion that fighting for justice is somehow the thing only "irrational people" would choose totally pisses me off.

I totally understand someone making a rational decision in favor of other priorities. It's what most people would do. But thank god for people who take the road less traveled. It's to them we owe the rights and freedom the rest of us take for granted. There's nothing "irrational" about that.

A major thrust of what I'm saying is in the fact that Marco is a single indie developer. Not a large company with more resources.

Fighting against the federal government over this seems like picking the wrong battle. He got is server back in a couple of days. Obviously its likely that the feds have already cloned it but its not like they kept it indefinitely or wiped it clean.

Does it suck? Yes. Is this something he should be fighting over? Not in my book.

The road less traveled is starting and running Instapaper. Chasing the FBI is a waste of time. If you really care about the problem, start a "company" meant to provoke the FBI into accidentally procuring its servers.

This would seem the perfect situation for the EFF. At some point someone needs to choose (a) or else it will keep happening.

Perhaps. But a one-man team probably shouldn't be the one choosing that option.

Depends on the market you're in. I'd say overall, Steve Jackson Games gained enough publicity to make it worth their lawsuit in a different illegal-search-and-seizure case, especially when you add the $300k they got ($500k in today's money) from winning it. They had a stronger case, though, since the raid was directly targeted at them, and fairly carelessly executed.

I was more severely affected than marco and I'm certainly going to pursue this matter to find out what happened. I imagine the Curbed team might share my curiosity.

We were significantly harder hit than either you or Marco, looks like. Our entire stack of 3 servers - app server and db master/slave - disappeared and remains offline to this point.

I'm curious about what happened, but ultimately I put this down to an unfortunate side effect of using blades.

Great to hear that! As a customer from pinboard I really appreciated your communication during this.

Agreed on this point. You have to choose your battles, and this is a lose-lose battle. Even if he would fight, win and receive some type of compensation, that's unlikely to be greater than what you had to give up in the fight.

I wish more people thought the way you do. You, sir, are an inspiration.