Judge Rules TorrentSpy Destroyed Evidence 325
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."
Re:Not that I agree with the MPAA (Score:5, Informative)
In short, TorrentSpy lied to a judge, and they got caught. That was remarkably stupid, and they're being punished for it.
Re:Not that I agree with the MPAA (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously deliberate.
Re:Not that I agree with the MPAA (Score:3, Informative)
Don't forget earlier stories about her. (Score:5, Informative)
Since that topic has been expounded upon, here are some articles about the judge in the case:
1. Judge dismisses trial for prosecutor's misconduct [washingtonpost.com]
Here, she dismissed a case when the prosecutors offered a plea agreement to a witness so he could not testify for the defense.
2. Notorious BIG Trial mistrial declared [sohh.com]
In this instance, she declared a mistrial when LAPD was withholding evidence from the trial.
3. Pooh Trial Thrown out [suite101.com] (heh heh)
A trial involving the Winnie the Pooh was ruled in favor of Disney after the family was found to have "tampered" with files at Disney.
The judge has a love for evidence. Torrentspy shoulda known what would happen if they messed around with it.
No IP logs, indeed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Justice prevailed... (Score:5, Informative)
Please pay special attention to how much the artist cut is in traditional CD sales compared to the new digital distribution. You will find a huge disparity in what record companies are claiming and what is actually happening.
I don't think TorrentSpy will get much sympathy from
Re:How hard is it to destroy data (Score:3, Informative)
You can add a second wireless router, locked down, cascaded through the open router. Your own machines (i.e. your own home network) can then remain secure, yet your internet connection is still anonymously shared. Details here [custhelp.com].
Re:No IP logs, indeed (Score:2, Informative)
It's true, visiting a site means sending them your IP address momentarily so they can send you information. Some sites log that. My own site keeps the last 50 visitor's IP addresses. After that it discards them. Does that mean my forum doesn't have IP addresses? No. My forum keeps IP addresses, but I certainly couldn't link any activity on the forum to activity in other places on my site just using apache's logs unless I kept more than the latest 50 users on logs. And that would double my log files size in a day! I can't afford that. I don't get nearly the traffic they do. D'ah.
Re:Man, I love living in 21st century America! (Score:3, Informative)
1: TorrentSpy forums openly discuss infringement
2: MPAA files lawsuit
3: Wes Parker (TorrentSpy moderator, admin, it's not quite clear) says 'we need a plan to keep piracy off the forums'
4: Another moderator suggests creating a hidden forum and moving incriminating content there. Wes agrees.
5: Some time later, they begin editing forum posts -- retroactively -- to scrub incriminating parts of the posts.
That is to say, they didn't decide to *stop* the activity. They actively took steps to conceal it, *after* they learned about the suit, and then they actually destroyed (by censoring) the information. There's not a court anywhere in the whole country -- the whole world -- that's going to look on that as anything other than tampering with evidence. And then there's this brilliant exchange:
1: TorrentSpy testifies in court that IP information simply wasn't available
2: MPAA finds evidence TorrentSpy can implement and enforce bans of users by IP address
3: Under oath, a TorrentSpy moderator testifies IPs were logged until April 07 (more than a year after they were sued)
So they said they couldn't get IP addresses at all, no matter what, they simply didn't keep them. The judge ruled that they were lying through their teeth. According to the article, they did have IP addresses -- except conveniently when they were supposed to produce them in court -- and they had been logging them for a year after they were sued. Everything makes sense now: I was wondering why the ruling from the judge directed them to start keeping logs happened. It happened because TorrentSpy tried to snow job the court. Courts really don't like it when you do that.
Re:Man, I love living in 21st century America! (Score:5, Informative)
2: MPAA finds evidence TorrentSpy can implement and enforce bans of users by IP address [ON INTERNET FORUMS, NOT TRACKING SOFTWARE]
3: Under oath, a TorrentSpy moderator testifies IPs were logged [FOR FORUM SOFTWARE] until April 07 (more than a year after they were sued)
Fixed that for you. phpBB =/= bittorrent tracker, and no, you can't assume someone who visits the forums downloaded something illegally... MPAA apparently visited the forums...