June 12, 2007
Video download site ordered to spy on users
In a recent court ruling, made public last week, a federal judge ordered TorrentSpy.com to track the behavior of its own users - a means of gathering evidence in a lawsuit against the site by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). the Register reports.
"On Friday, the judge granted a stay of the order, and TorrentSpy plans to appeal.
The MPAA filed suit against TorrentSpy in February last year, accusing the BitTorrent-based site of facilitating illegal downloads of copyrighted material. The new court order requires the site to turn over server logs of user activity, including IP addresses and downloaded files. TorrentSpy already collects this data in memory, but never saves it to disk. The site says that keeping server logs would violate its privacy policy.
... If the decision is upheld, some believe it's capable of eroding end-user privacy across the Net. Before Judge Choijian's ruling, no US company has been required to log memory data and turn it over to a court as evidence.
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