U.S. government prosecutors and Kyle Goodwin will submit briefs because "the court finds that it is unable to reach a conclusion as to this matter without an evidentiary hearing," according to the order, signed on Tuesday by U.S. District Court Judge Liam O'Grady in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a motion in March on behalf of Goodwin, an Ohio-based sports reporter who lost access to data he stored on Megaupload after the site was shutdown on January on criminal copyright infringement charges.

The EFF has asked the court to find a way to return data to owners who legally hold the rights. Megaupload's 1,103 servers, which hold upwards of 28 petabytes of data, are still held by Carpathia Hosting, Megaupload's U.S. hosting provider.

"We are glad that Mr. Goodwin will finally get to make his case in court, and we look forward to helping the judge fashion a procedure to make all of Megaupload's consumers whole again by granting them access to what is legally theirs," Julie Samuels, an EFF staff attorney.

Megupload will ask the court to make a special appearance in order to weigh in on the data issue, said Ira Rothken, one of the file-sharing site's attorneys, on Friday.