p2pnet - rss feed: Overturn TorrentSpy ruling: EFF, CDT
p2pnet.net news:- A copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Hollywood against a torrent site has opened the Net even more abuse from Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, the major studios.
TorrentSpy said it would never monitor users without their consent, but Hollywood succeeded in getting a US Court to rule that the site must, as part of electronic discovery obligations, log users’ activities.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) want the decision overturned.
“This unprecedented ruling has implications well beyond the file sharing context,” says EFF staff attorney Corynne McSherry.
“Giving litigants the power to rewrite their opponent’s privacy policies poses a risk to all Internet users.”
TorrentSpy indexes materials made publicly available via the Bit Torrent file sharing protocol.
An earlier MPAA attempt to improperly ferret out information about users, failed.
MPAA director of legal affairs Dean Garfield (right) was said to have promised to pay $15,000 for information stolen from Torrentspy.com, “after he [Garfield] and the MPAA reviewed it, if they found it useful,” says a court document, going on:
Dean Garfield expressly told the informant, on behalf of the MPAA, regarding the information that he requested, “We don’t care how you get it.” He assured the informant, when the informant expressed concerns about potential liability for obtaining or providing such information to the MPAA, that the MPAA would protect the informant from any liability for obtaining or providing such information.
Isohunt.com, BTHub.com, TorrentBox.com, NiteShadow.com, Ed2k-It.com and Torrentspy.com were all sued by the MPAA and in March, 2006, Torrentspy.com filed to dismiss the action.
“It’s particularly notable that the MPAA has not denied the allegation they entered into an agreement with the informant, signed by the MPAA’s Dean Garfield, to acquire information about a number of torrent search sites including Torrentspy.com,” Rothken told p2pnet at the time.
In their appeal for reason, the magistrate judge incorrectly decided that, because the IP addresses exist in the Random Access Memory (RAM) of TorrentSpy’s webservers, they are “electronically stored information” that must be collected and turned over to the studios under the rules of federal discovery, say the EFF and CDT.
The decision, “could reach every function carried out by a digital device. Every keystroke at a computer keyboard, for example, is temporarily held in RAM, even if it is immediately deleted and never saved. Similarly, digital telephone systems make recordings of every conversation, moment by moment, in RAM.”
In the analog world, “a court would never think to force a company to record telephone calls, transcribe employee conversations, or log other ephemeral information,” says EFF senior staff lawyer Fred von Lohmann. “There is no reason why the rules should be different simply because a company uses digital technologies.”
The decision also threatens to “radically increase the burdens that companies face in federal lawsuits, potentially forcing them to create and store an avalanche of data, including computer server logs, digital telephone conversations, and drafts of documents never saved or sent,” adds the EFF.
The proceedings have been stayed while TorrentSpy appeals the ruling.
The case is Columbia Pictures Industries v. Bunnell, No. 06-01093 FMC, pending in the US District Court for the Central District of California before Judge Florence-Marie Cooper.
Also See:
log users’ activities - TorrentSpy ordered to track users, June 9, 2007
EFF - Dangerous Ruling Forces Search Engine to Log Users, June 25, 2007
improperly ferret out - ‘MPAA engaged in piracy’, May 26, 2006
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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July 2nd, 2007 at 5:27 pm
[…] more abuse from Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, the major studios,” p2pnet posted yesterday, going […]