A New York judge today ruled against Microsoft in its bid to prevent U.S. officials from seizing data stored on international servers.

As reported by Bloomberg, Judge Loretta Preska sided with a lower court, but stayed her decision so Microsoft can appeal.

"The only issue that was certain this morning was that the District Court's decision would not represent the final step in this process," Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith said in a statement. "We will appeal promptly and continue to advocate that people's email deserves strong privacy protection in the U.S. and around the world."

At issue is a summons granted to the U.S. government in December as part of a criminal inquiry, which provided them with access to emails stored in Redmond's Dublin data center. Microsoft challenged the summons and lost in April, but appealed again, resulting in today's decision.

In a Tuesday op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Smith wrote that "Microsoft believes you own emails stored in the cloud, and that they have the same privacy protection as paper letters sent by mail."

"This means, in our view, that the U.S. government can obtain emails only subject to the full legal protections of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment," he continued. "It means, in this case, that the U.S. government must have a warrant. But under well-established case law, a search warrant cannot reach beyond U.S. shores."

The U.S. government would surely have a problem with foreign governments accessing emails stored in U.S. data centers, Smith suggested. "Yet the U.S. government is taking precisely this position toward emails stored in Microsoft's data center in Ireland," he wrote.

Apple and Cisco have voiced their support for Microsoft on this issue. The move "places providers and their employees at significant risk of foreign sanctions, and threatens a potential loss of customer confidence in U.S. providers generally," the said.