Microsoft cemented a major legal victory today, as a federal appeals court declined to hear the government’s appeal in a landmark cloud computing case. The government sought to search data stored on Microsoft servers in Ireland as part of a US drug case, arguing the servers were still subject to US warrant laws. A lower court dismissed the government’s case in July, and today’s en banc ruling means that ruling will not be overturned.

The ruling is a significant precedent as US courts seek to reconcile legal borders with the international logic of cloud computing. Although the data in question was held by an American user and presumably accessed primarily from computers within US borders, data center logistics made it most efficient for…

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