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*Not* generating logs is not an option... when you're under subpoena

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Working as I do for a company that exists because of copyright, I'm not particularly sympathetic to TorrentSpy, a search engine company that is accused by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) of helping to enable copyright infringement by making it easier to find content on the BitTorrent file sharing network.

How does this pertain to logging?  Well, TorrentSpy doesn't do any.  Or at least they didn't used to.  So when they received a court order demanding logs, they said "sorry, no can do". However the judge ruled that since the server's memory temporarily contained information like the search terms that were requested and the IP address that was the source of the request, and that even though that was only temporarily in RAM, that it was still "stored information", so turn it over.  In other words, TorrentSpy had better produce some logs, and soon.  Initially the court will allow masking of IP address information before the logs are turned over to the MPAA

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 31, 2007
    As I wrote about earlier, TorrentSpy, a file-sharing search engine, was ordered by a U.S. magistrate