Privacy or Piracy? Torrentspy.com loses US copyright case…
Monday 17th December 2007, San Francisco - the operators of Torrentspy.com, the popular bit torrent search engine, have lost a copyright case against the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) after it was ruled that they had tampered with evidence by ignoring a ruling to retain server logs and unique online computer addresses. In a ruling that could have implications for the privacy of Web site users, Judge Florence-Marie Cooper of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, ruled that TorrentSpy has infringed MPAA copyrights.
The indexing web site hosts torrent files or files that contain the basic information about a file or set of files, such as the file name, size, date created etc. The web site allows users to browse these torrent files and enables peer to peer sharing by facilitating the online exchange of films, music and TV programmes. As of August 2007, there were over 1,000,000 user submitted torrents indexed on the site and over one million users. TorrentSpy billed itself as the “The Largest Bit Torrent Search Engine”, a central location to find files distributed on BitTorrent P-to-P (peer-to-peer) networks.
Torrentspy’s first major legal troubles began in May 2005 when the site was forced to remove all links to torrents of the “Star Wars: Episode III” film after a stolen workprint was leaked to the internet. In February 2006, the MPAA filed a lawsuit against Torrentspy for “abusing technology to facilitate infringement of copyrighted works.”
In May 2007, a federal judge ordered that TorrentSpy begin monitoring its users’ activities and to submit these logs with information including what BitTorrent files users requested as well as the time and date of those requests, to the MPAA. This would show whether the users were on the site for legal purposes or whether the service existed to enable piracy. The defendants argued that they never tracked visitors’ activity and as the websites servers were located in the Netherlands, they were protected by Dutch law from having to turn over server logs. However, the judge responded by telling them to retrieve the information from their servers’ random-access memory, or RAM.
TorrentSpy argued that RAM is far too ephemeral to be considered “stored data.” In this unprecedented decision, the judge ruled that data found in RAM is a tangible document that can be stored and must be turned over in civil litigation. The decision was widely criticised as being an unreasonable standard because information held in RAM is temporary.
In August 2007, TorrentSpy appealed the decision but lost. During the time a judge was reviewing TorrentSpy’s appeal to overturn the order, some adjustments were made to the website. In a new ruling, the judge found that TorrentSpy had destroyed or altered several types of evidence, including user IP addresses, discussion forum postings about the trading of movies and moderator identities during these modifications. Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy’s attorney argued that “the primary reason for the changes was to protect end-user privacy worldwide.” “It’s not a ruling on the merits of the case, one person’s willful destruction of evidence is another person’s willful attempt to comply with customer privacy policies.”
The company then shut down access to U.S. residents and international users using US-based ISPs on the basis that if TorrentSpy had no U.S. users, then there wouldn’t be any information stored in the company’s RAM about US users. Only data on International users would be logged and U.S. courts don’t have authority over them. In response, the MPAA filed documents calling TorrentSpy’s denial of access “another illegitimate attempt by defendants to evade authority of this court and the May 29 order”, and asking for sanctions. TorrentSpy’s attorney, Ira Rothken, has stated that TorrentSpy would rather deny access to U.S. users before it started monitoring anyone, since such monitoring is in violation of TorrentSpy’s own privacy policy.
The result of the case this week has effectively labelled TorrentSpy a pirate site. John Malcolm, the MPAA’s executive vice president and director of worldwide anti-piracy operations, said that “the sole purpose of TorrentSpy and sites like it is to facilitate and promote the unlawful dissemination of copyrighted content. TorrentSpy is a one-stop shop for copyright infringement.”
Source: BBC News
Related Links:
- Wikipaedia - Torrentspy
- Hollywood Asks YouTube: Friend or Foe?