Movie studios to judge: TorrentSpy defies court order

To avoid having to turn over user information to the motion picture industry, the BitTorrent indexing service TorrentSpy cut off access to its site in the United States. Apparently, that wasn't enough to satisfy Hollywood.

According to documents filed with the court last week and reviewed by CNET News.com on Wednesday, the studios still want information on the site's visitors. Lawyers representing the studios--armed with a court order--say TorrentSpy has refused to hand over the data. Because of that, the movie sector wants the judge to throw the book at the company.

"(TorrentSpy) took steps to make the Server Log Data unavailable for the express purpose of avoiding compliance with the (court) order," the movie studios said in documents filed with the court last week. "This claim should be seen for what it is: another illegitimate attempt by defendants to evade authority of this court and the May 29 order."

TorrentSpy was ordered in May to begin tracking visitors' activity and collect information, such as what BitTorrent files users requested as well as the time and date of those requests. This would show whether TorrentSpy users were on the site for legal purposes or whether the service existed to enable piracy.

During the time a judge was reviewing TorrentSpy's appeal to overturn the order, company executives made some adjustments to the site.

Sometime in July, TorrentSpy stopped providing users with cached downloads of BitTorrent files, the technology favored by many for distributing large files over the Web and a favorite of the file-sharing community, according to court documents. This meant that searches for BitTorrent files at TorrentSpy would return only links to third-party sites.

Clicking on those links wouldn't ping TorrentSpy's servers, and as a result, none of the data that the film companies sought would be stored on TorrentSpy's RAM.

Was this an attempt by the company to evade the judge's order?

"The primary reason for the changes was to protect end-user privacy worldwide," said Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy's attorney. "Web sites are allowed to evolve their technology during litigation especially if they evolve to protect user privacy. The irony here is that studios are blowing hot and cold. On one hand they asked in their lawsuit for TorrentSpy in essence to shut down U.S. traffic. When the company did, the plaintiffs complained that TorrentSpy is in violation for not supplying information under the log file order. They're never satisfied."

The studios first filed their copyright lawsuit against TorrentSpy last year.

On May 29, Jacqueline Chooljian, a federal magistrate judge in Los Angeles, ordered TorrentSpy to hand over information about user activity.

TorrentSpy executives told the judge that they never tracked visitors' activity. She responded by telling them to retrieve the information from their servers' random-access memory, or RAM.

In an 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. TorrentSpy argued that RAM is far too ephemeral to be considered "stored data."

In August, TorrentSpy appealed the decision but lost. The company then shut down access to U.S. residents. If TorrentSpy had no U.S. users, then there wouldn't be any information stored in the company's RAM under the judge's purview, legal experts said. Only data on International users would be logged and U.S. courts don't have authority over them.

But the studios didn't go away.

For not complying with the court order, Hollywood has asked the judge to impose evidentiary sanctions against the company, documents show. As part of the sanctions, the studios want the judge to rule that the movies belonging to the studios found on TorrentSpy's site infringed on their copyright. They also want the judge to find that the site has no "substantial noninfringing uses."

This would effectively label TorrentSpy a pirate site and make it very difficult for the company to prevail in its civil trial against the film industry.

Just how long it will take for the judge to rule on the studios' application for sanctions is unclear. Rothken said he expects that she will call for more briefings soon.

[Ushiikun]

Jurisdiction?

If U.S. users are no longer able to access this website, and the site is hosted outside the U.S., how does a U.S. court have any authority over the site? Shouldn't the movie studios be going after the site in the country that it is hosted in?

[Heebee Jeebies]

The term you are looking for is...

Treaties. The US has many treaties with other countries around the world that would either give our courts jurisdiction, allow for extradition or allow companies here in the US to go after them.

The only countries they would really be safe in is one that doesn't have treaties with us like Iran, Libya, etc.

The problem with stopping US user access is they did this AFTER the court ordered them to start keeping the data or to start recording the data. At that point they broke the court order because they didn't do what the court ordered. Had this change been made BEFORE the court ordered they would most likely be fine.

In the end they will be labeled as a pirate site with no non copyright infringing uses.

Robert

[nuckelhedd]

The problem with the ruling

stems from the Judges' technological incompetence. I challenge any of you to try t capture what is in your R.A.M. a any given point. I'll wait go ahead and try. Can't do it can you? R.A.M. is not as the Judge thinks "a document" had she ordered the collection of server logs she would have had them. However simply by accessing the R.A.M. will stop activity on the server and initiate a dump. If you are lucky you might get something usable but probably nt because at that point the ram is processing the request for dumping and has dumped what was previously there. Since TorrentSpy doesn't automatically log ram usage (in the interest of actually being able to run the server at speed as well as respect privacy not to mention needing terrabytes of storage)there is nothing to turn over. Perhaps the Studios should hire lawyers with some knowledge of something beyond a typewriter.

IMHO

[sarainsanfran]

What about the Public Domain?

"In the end they will be labeled as a pirate site with no non copyright infringing uses."

I don't doubt that will happen, but I hope the judge will remember that not all movies are protected by copyright law anymore. So what TorrentSpy really needs to do is offer a bunch of old Shirley Temple movies (or any other <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_domain_films>public domain films), which will in turn mean the site has a purpose other than copyright infringement.

[sarainsanfran]

Woops

So much for my html... Please excuse the noob error.

[davewithipod]

Spooky!

Apparently shutting access to Americans was NOT what the movie studios wanted. It seems what they DO want is a privately owned non-American company to spy on Americans, sanctioned by a court order.

Goes to show that international treaties, that allow these sorts of court cases, do not necessarily serve the people of those countries. They serve big bucks, ie. MAI, NAFTA, CAFTA, on and on and on...

[speed_pour]

Comment about the writing

For once I find myself reading a pretty decent CNet article that reported the facts, details, and comments of the situation (congrats for that, it's certainly rare these days).

The problem...why on earth is this a CNet Blog and not a real news posting? 80% of the articles I see listed under "News" are a sentence or two from being pure opinion pieces or paid marketting. This is exactly the type of article that really belongs under the title of "News".