December 19th, 2007
If yesterday's ruling holds, TorrentSpy must die
If, as I think likely, TorrentSpy.com loses its appeals, then that’s one more piece of corroboration to my long-held believe that the torrents are dens of thieves.
Not only that, but that would mark one more reason why, at least in my book, torrents and related tools that enable the illegal distribution of copyrighted works must die.
OK some background.
My colleague Elinor Mills reports the ruling of a federal judge that BitTorrent indexing service TorrentSpy.com hid and destroyed evidence in a case involving alleged facilitation of distributing copyrighted movies.
“Defendants’ conduct during discovery in this case has been obstreperous,” Elinor notes that the court concluded. “They have engaged in widespread and systematic efforts to destroy evidence and have provided false testimony under oath in an effort to hide evidence of such destruction.”
The specific acts that the court believes that TorrentSpy.com have committed include the intentional modification and deletion of directory headings mentioning copyrighted titles; deletion of forum posts that were believed to guide site visitors to finding files of these copyrighted works, masking the IP addys of users, as well as withholding the names and addresses of forum moderators.
And yes, as Elinor notes, TorrentSpy had earlier been fined $30,000 for violations of discovery orders and were warned of severe sanctions if they continued to ignore the orders.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
