Court Tells TorrentSpy It Needs To Spy On Users

from the but-why? dept

Popular BitTorrent search engine TorrentSpy was told by a federal judge on May 29th that it needed to keep log files of user activity on its site, even if there was no business reason for it. TorrentSpy is nothing more than a specialized search engine, but the entertainment industry wants to paint it as something worse. This latest ruling comes out of a lawsuit between TorrentSpy and the MPAA over the legality of TorrentSpy's search engine. However, the ruling really is extraordinary in many ways. Rather than asking a company to hand over previous records, the court is actually asking TorrentSpy to purposely create new records that it has no need for and hand them over to a private party (the MPAA). What's worse is that this directly contradicts TorrentSpy's own privacy policy -- so obeying the court order would open them up additional legal trouble. TorrentSpy hasn't started spying on users and is appealing the ruling instead (and its lawyer suggests the site would sooner shut down than follow the court order). Hopefully, the appeals court will recognize that requiring a site to specifically create new records (in violation of its own policies) and then handing them over to another entity in an ongoing trial is not a good idea.