Microsoft seems to have got itself involved at the start of an awful lot of legal pain here. A US judge has agreed that Microsoft should release under a US search warrant an email that is being stored on servers in Ireland. Yet European Union (and thus Irish) law on such matters says that only a court local to that jurisdiction can make such a decision. This is thus another example of the tendency of US law to try to apply itself extraterritorially, outside the actual physical jurisdiction of the US. And it’s not really all that easy to see which way the case is going to go in the end: