Judge orders TorrentSpy to hand over user data

#1

By Jose Vilches, TechSpot.com
Published: June 11, 2007, 3:52 PM EST

TorrentSpy.com has received a federal judge order to monitor its users' activities by keeping detailed server logs which must then be handed over to the MPAA. The popular BitTorrent tracker site intends to appeal the ruling by the June 12 deadline it was given. The judge's order comes after the Motion Picture Association of America and other top Hollywood film studios sued TorrentSpy and a host of others back in February 2006 as part of a sweep against file-sharing companies.

There is some speculation about U.S. visitors being blocked from accessing the torrent site if the order is allowed to stand. TorrentSpy pledges not to track visitors activities or to collect any personal information about users because it explicitly states in its privacy policy that it will never do so, thus they should not be required by litigation to create new records to hand over discovery. The movies studios, however, might have a powerful weapon in their war on copyright infringement, according to a report by CNET News.com:

The courts have for the first time found that the electronic trail briefly left in a computer server's RAM, or random access memory, by each visitor to a site is "stored information" and must be turned over as evidence during litigation.

According to court documents, user data is in fact stored in the RAM for about six hours on TorrentSpy™s servers, so the defendants are not really being asked to create new information, and failing to deliver these records could be considered as concealing evidence.

Source: techspot.com

Relevant article (CNET report): news.com

#2

Good thing I don't visit that site anyway... /:D" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt=":D" />

#3

I better find another site to visit then.

How about stopping people from coming up with new technology. Go after the people that make the blank disks.

If the technology is there people will find away copy things. If there was not any blank disk then people wouldn't be able to sell bootleg disks.

#4

dude... i get my shit from there,,,,,

goddam those greedy motion picture studios....

i still watch movies at the cinemas.....

#5

Torrent Spy: "Oops it'll take six hours to retreive the data"

MPAAsshole: "Damn foiled again!!!"

#6

If people understood the implications that this sort of thing held for their personal rights, they boycott new movie releases. Imagine the statement it would have made if Spiderman 3's open weekend sold less then $100k. Do you think they would back off?

#7

I read somewhere that Torrentspy had been forced to give over user data a week (or even two - three ?) ago.

I haven't used it for at least that long and won't use it again at all now.