TorrentSpy to appeal 110-mln-dollar ruling in film piracy suit

ahmedvisham · #1 29-05-2008, 05:38 PM

A TorrentSpy lawyer vowed Thursday to appeal a 110-million-dollar legal judgment against the website for directing people to unauthorized online copies of films and television shows.

Valence Media shut down its TorrentSpy website in March and filed for bankruptcy last week in the face of a lawsuit brought against it by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

The Los Angeles federal judge presiding over the case ruled on Wednesday that TorrentSpy should pay 110 million dollars in damages for its role in online piracy of copyrighted motion pictures and television shows.

"This substantial money judgment sends a strong message about the illegality of these sites," said MPAA chairman Dan Glickman.

"The demise of TorrentSpy is a clear victory for the studios and demonstrates that such pirate sites will not be allowed to continue to operate without facing relentless litigation by copyright holders."

TorrentSpy lawyer Ira Rothken counters that the judge's decision stemmed from Valence's refusal to reveal the identities of website users and that whether the website infringed copyrights was never resolved in court.

TorrentSpy sent "spiders" crawling the Internet to find torrent files without asking their contents and then compiled online addresses in a public index hosted on computer servers in the Netherlands.

Torrent files get their name from the software protocol used to create them and are commonly used to store film, television and other digital video on home computers of people who share them in "peer-to-peer" networks.

Rothken argues that TorrentSpy was no more culpable for copyright infringement than major Internet search engines because it did not link to indexed files but only provided text files letting people know where to find them.

"If an author wrote a book on where to find things and someone went after them, would freedom of speech trump copyright authority" Rothken asked.

"Are you still allowed to run a search engine when there are a lot of bad torrent files These are issues we should have gotten to in the case."

Rothken said that within two weeks he will ask the Ninth Circuit of Appeals in Northern California to overturn the judge's ruling and set the case for trial.

"The case was not decided on the merits of copyright issues whatsoever," Rothken said.

Rothken said conflict between US rules of evidence and European privacy standards resulted in the judge ruling from the bench instead of letting the case go to trial.

Valence, which is incorporated in the former British territory of Nevis in the Caribbean, filed for bankruptcy in British court.

During an evidence gathering phase in US court the judge ordered TorrentSpy to provide identifying computer addresses of users correlated with lists of their searches at the website.

Valence provided information but with some numbers erased from computer "IP" addresses to protect users' identities. The court deemed the act destruction of evidence and decided the case in favor of the MPAA.

"In the end of the day, one person's evidence destroyer is another person's privacy protector and one person's copyright infringer is another person's free speech protector," Rothken aid.

"Those are the tensions going on between TorrentSpy and Hollywood."

The judge ruled Valence culpable of "vicarious" copyright infringement along with inducing and contributing to such acts, according to the MPAA. A court order was issued barring TorrentSpy from operating.

Film piracy costs the worldwide motion picture industry more than 18 billion dollars annually, with seven billion dollars of that revenue loss blamed on illegal distribution of movies on the Internet, according to the MPAA.

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