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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.

This is the sixth in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University. The previous installments looked at process technology, multicore designs, IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!

We began Tuesday morning with a session on assorted technology developments.

The first talk was from Sun Microsystems, about the company's Proximity chip-to-chip interconnect technology. Today, to put multiple chips in a package--a common technique in high-end servers, for example--each chip will be individually connected to the package substrate through conductive ... Read more

Hynix is shaking things up in the memory market with its decision to license Innovative Silicon's Z-RAM technology.

The two companies jointly announced the agreement on Monday.

Z-RAM is a twist on the traditional makeup of a memory cell. Almost all PCs use DRAM to temporarily store information while the system is running, to avoid delays accessing that data from the hard drive every time it is needed. And each DRAM cell needs a transistor and a capacitor, which stores electrical charge, to represent a bit of data. But Innovative Silicon figured out a way to take advantage of the "floating-body effect" to make a transistor with the capacitor built right in there, reducing the size and complexity of a memory cell.

That results in a memory cell that is easier to scale into the future, as chip companies work to keep Intel co-founder Gordon Moore honest, and that also uses less power than a conventional DRAM cell. AMD already has a license for Z-RAM for use as the cache memory in microprocessors.

Hynix didn't say when it plans to have Z-RAM-based computer memory ready for sale, but it's likely to take some time as the undulating DRAM market rolls forward over the next several years. Perhaps this would also make it cheaper for PC companies to put more than 4GBs of memory into their systems, finally kicking off the 64-bit era of personal computing.

As expected, the Electronic Frontier Foundation plans to file a friends-of-the-court brief in support of TorrentSpy, the search engine accused of copyright violations.

The top motion-picture studios filed a lawsuit last year against TorrentSpy and other search engines that locate torrent files. The studios allege in their suit that these companies simplify the illegal sharing of copyright content.

The magistrate judge hearing the case recently ruled that computer RAM or random-access memory, is a tangible document that can be stored and must be turned over in a lawsuit. If allowed to stand, the groundbreaking decision may mean that anyone defending themselves in a civil suit could be required to turn over information in their computer's RAM hardware. This could force companies and individuals to store vast amounts of data, say technology experts.

The judge has ordered TorrentSpy to create logs detailing users' activities on the site.

Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney with EFF, which advocates for the rights of Internet users, said the group has notified representatives from TorrentSpy and the motion picture studios of their intent to file an amicus brief that argues for a reversal of the judge's decision.

He added that EFF is also looking for others to join them on the brief.

"This is the first time the court has found that information found only in RAM is subject to preservation," von Lohmann said. "Companies may be obliged to begin logging and producing information about conversations that occur on digital phones, which are stored on RAM. Nobody is asked to preserve records for analog phone conversations."

Lawyers from the Motion Picture Assoc. of America argue that the law has always found RAM to be electronically stored information and that there won't be any significant impact to others besides those engaged in illegal file sharing.

The movie studios may have discovered a new and powerful weapon in their war on copyright infringement.

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 documents seen by CNET News.com.

Jacqueline Chooljian, a federal judge in the Central District of California in Los Angeles, issued the decision while presiding over a court fight between the studios and TorrentSpy, the BitTorrent search engine accused of copyright infringement in a lawsuit filed last year by the film industry. On May 29, Chooljian ordered TorrentSpy to begin logging user activity, including IP addresses, and turn the data over to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

The judge stayed the order on Friday to allow TorrentSpy time to prepare an appeal, which must be filed by Tuesday. She also allowed TorrentSpy to mask the Internet Protocol addresses of the site's users "at least at this juncture."

This may be the first time that anyone has argued that information within RAM is electronically stored information and therefore subject to the rules of evidence, Chooljian said according to court records. Up to now, many Web sites that promised users anonymity, such as TorrentSpy, believed they need only to switch off their servers' logging function to avoid storing user data.

Should Chooljian's order stand, the decision could force Web sites to rethink privacy precautions.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation called the judge's decision "troubling" and said it could mean that any Web site operator could be compelled to log user activity anytime they faced a lawsuit. In its privacy policy, TorrentSpy pledges not to collect any personal information about users except when they "specifically and knowingly provide such information."

But user data was stored at TorrentSpy, according to Chooljian. The judge said in court documents that this information survived on TorrentSpy's server RAM for about six hours. RAM is defined by Chooljian as "a chip where volatile internal memory is stored."

The judge agreed with the MPAA that the existence of user data in RAM enabled TorrentSpy to retrieve user information. She also wrote that the data was crucial for getting at the truth in the case, according to records.

"There can be no serious dispute that the Server Log Data in issue is extremely relevant," the judge said in her finding.

Concealed evidence?
In one of the most hotly contested disputes so far in the case, the records show that the MPAA accused TorrentSpy of trying to conceal evidence when the search engine began directing visitors to the servers of an outside vendor.

The MPAA claimed that TorrentSpy did this to avoid being in possession of user information as the search engine anticipated receiving a court order, according to records. TorrentSpy denied the accusations and said that the outside vendor was chosen for "significantly faster processing and delivery."

Among the arguments TorrentSpy made against turning over logs was that the law only required the company to produce documents already in possession. It did not ask for the creation of new records.

But that's exactly what the judge was asking the company to do, TorrentSpy's attorneys asserted in court records. Chooljian disagreed.

"Since the information is already in the RAM, then defendants aren't really being asked to create new information," Chooljian wrote.

She also noted that it was not her goal to set a far-reaching precedent with her decision.

"The court emphasizes that its ruling," Chooljian said in the documents, "should not be read to require litigants in all cases to preserve and produce electronically stored information that is temporarily stored only in RAM."

TorrentSpy's other arguments against tracking users were that the costs were too high and that the action would violate user's privacy and hinder free speech. All were rejected.

In response to TorrentSpy's free-speech argument, the judge cited other cases that had established illegal file sharing "qualifies for minimal First Amendment protection."

Should TorrentSpy lose in appeal, it would likely have seven days to produce data logs, according to the court records. The company's attorney, Ira Rothken, said Friday that it is unlikely TorrentSpy would continue operations in the United States if forced to turn over user data.