Judge Rules TorrentSpy Destroyed Evidence

Come play kdice writes "A federal judge has handed the MPAA a resounding victory in its copyright infringement lawsuit against TorrentSpy. Judge Florence-Marie Cooper entered a default judgment against Justin Bunnell and the rest of the named defendants in Columbia Pictures et al. v. Justin Bunnell et al. after finding that TorrentSpy 'engaged in widespread and systematic efforts to destroy evidence'. After being sued, TorrentSpy mounted a vigorous defense, including a counter-suit it filed against the MPAA in May 2006, but, behind the scenes, the court documents paint a picture of a company desperately trying to bury any and all incriminating evidence. TorrentSpy has announced its intention to appeal, but its conduct makes a reversal unlikely."

Comments

Man, I love living in 21st century America!

[elrous0]

When the CIA destroys evidence that they tortured prisoners, the entire Justice Department jumps to their defense and gives their director a medal. When a small company that just provides links to pirated movies destroys evidence to protect its users from the thugs at the MPAA, they're criminals and must be punished!

Re:Man, I love living in 21st century America!

[JasterBobaMereel]

If you read the article properly you will find that the evidence they destroyed was never collected, they did not destroy it they just didn't save it in the first place ...

Oh and this is not a US company so the MPAA and the US courts cannot order them to save information that is not required by European law ...?

America the land of the free ... well freeish.... sort of

Re:Man, I love living in 21st century America!

[Buran]

Of course, then if you rule that forum admins can't clean discussion of illegal activity from their forums so that they don't get sued for what their users do, that means you're automatically screwed if you run a forum because you'll get sued if you don't clean it off, and sued if you do.

I won't be surprised if I start seeing forums close left and right due to this.

Moral: run a discussion forum, you'll get sued no matter what you do. Don't bother running a discussion forum.

Re:Man, I love living in 21st century America!

[AvitarX]

Well this is the case where a judge ruled that information in RAM was a pertinant and they needed to keep a constant RAM dump to continue operating in the US (or a log of all US IPs).

Perhaps dropping info out of RAM is the destruction.

Re:Man, I love living in 21st century America!

[FirstOne]

"The judge in this case was looking for a way to say the defendant was obligated to keep durable records of his misdeeds, practically to the point of tapping the memory bus. "

The judges actions go even further.. He ordering TorrentSpy to eavesdrop on Foreign communications. A Criminal act, especially in the EU.. As a consequence TorrentSpy collected just enough information to prove that both the request and the torrent host were OUTSIDE the USA in which NO US court has any business collecting private data.

Remember TorrentSpy stopped servicing US IP addresses when ordered to start collecting the data.

"Torrentspy Acts to Protect Privacy"

Sorry, but because you are located in the USA you cannot use the search features of the Torrentspy.com website.Torrentspy's decision to stop accepting US visitors was NOT compelled by any Court but rather an uncertain legal climate in the US regarding user privacy and an apparent tension between US and European Union privacy laws.

We hope you understand and will take the opportunity to visit one of these other fine websites:"

Technically, if the federal judge proceeds to trial, he would be guilty of several serious crimes.
Extortion, spying, acts of war, and privacy violations among the many countries that use the Internet.
A suggestion to judge Cooper, I wouldn't go traveling outside the USA, unless you want to be locked up for a very long time.

Meanwhile the MPAA just received a meaningless victory.
No foreign court will honor any judgment against TorrentSpy that was based on it's refusal to follow court orders requiring the commission of a criminal act.
Hopefully a significantly wiser circuit court will rule the Coopers actions where inappropriate,
remove him from the case, and vacate all judgments. (Less they too want to wish to dispose of their passports as well.)

Severe Penalties Make it the Best Option

[TheMiddleRoad]

Perhaps a lawyer can tell us which has worse penalties, destruction of evidence or being found guilty of helping piracy. I imagine it's the latter.

How hard is it to destroy data

[IceCreamGuy]

I've always wondered what I would do if I got a letter in the mail telling me I was being sued by the MPAA or RIAA (obviously not the same as a large site like torrentspy, but kinda related), we keep our wireless router open, default passwords, broadcast ssid, no encryption, 50 leases, no MAC filtering, nothing. I know it sounds bad, but we figure that if we ever got a notice from one of these organizations that we could simply say that there's no way to know who downloaded these things, our wireless is open! We have neighbors and other people in our DHCP client list and it actually makes me feel more secure (I manage my actual security at my computer, not at the gateway) since I feel like it would make for a good defense. However, what to do with the offending data? I've always thought that if I DoD wiped all my disks, obviously that would leave no evidence, but could you actually get in trouble for doing that? Do they send you documents telling you that kind of thing is illegal? What if I just took out my data drives, hid them in the attic and cleaned out my logs and MRU data with Adaware? Is it really that hard to react to these kinds of things for the average consumer or am I missing a great deal?

Re:Thanks For Destroying the Evidence!

[phobos13013]

Not familiar with TorrentSpy Admins, but I would imagine they did it to protect themselves from jail rather than a altruistic attempt to withhold your IP address from the MPAA. Its the cynic in me speaking....