The judge ruled in favor of the Motion Picture Association of America because the website operators tampered with the evidence
By: Captain Maverick
Published: Dec 20, 2007
Updated: Sep 2, 2010
TorrentSpy.com lost the copyright lawsuit filed by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) reportedly because the operators of TorrentSpy tampered with the evidence. U.S. District Court for the Central District of California Judge Florence-Marie Cooper ruled in a default judgment against the operators of TorrentSpy.com, that they were guilty of copyright violations.
The defendants, Justin Bunnell, Forrest Parker, Wes Parker and Valence Media reportedly destroyed evidence after the judge had ordered them to keep server logs, including user IP addresses among other information. According to Judge Cooper, the defendants engaged in widespread and systematic efforts to destroy and hide evidence and had even provided false testimony under oath in an effort to hide evidence of the destruction.
TorrentSpy argued that it had located several of its servers in the Netherlands and that Dutch law protected them from having to turn over the server logs. But in May, a U.S. Magistrate ruled that TorrentSpy must preserve the server data logs that were held in the server RAM. The problem is that information held in RAM is temporary by nature but Judge Cooper said that TorrentSpy had altered several types of evidence including the user IP addresses and discussion forum postings about the movie trades. This ruling could have far-reaching implications for website owners throughout the U.S.
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