The public BitTorrent tracker site says it won’t track visitors to the site as ordered by a recent federal court ruling, and would instead block sever access from the US.
Jacqueline Chooljian, a federal judge for the Central District of California in Los Angeles ruled on May 29th that TorrentSpy must begin tracking users’ activity on the site, a ruling which it intends to appeal by the June 12th deadline it was given.
The BitTorrent tracker site has repeatedly argued against tracking visitors to the site because it explicitly states in its privacy policy that it will never do so.
It reads:
TorrentSpy.com does not sell, trade or rent your personal information to other companies. TorrentSpy.com will not collect any personal information about you except when you specifically and knowingly provide such information.
The judgment by the federal court comes as a result of an MPAA sweep conducted last February as part of a crackdown on file-sharing sites and networks.
What’s so ironic about the judgment though is that TorentSpy isn’t based in the US but, rather in the Netherlands, meaning that once again the US will try to prevent others from conducting a “legitimate business” it doesn’t approve of on the internet. The ban on internet gambling was a previous example of how insane the US has become in regards to e-commerce. The internet must never be compartmentalized by legality, where things are allowed to be go on in certain segments and regions of the world and not in others. The whole purpose of the internet is to make communication and commerce a global affair, and actions by the world’s biggest economy to try and mold it into its own image is unfair to the other 5 plus billion people in the world.
Name: torrentspy.com
Addresses: 82.192.86.142
inetnum: 82.192.86.0 – 82.192.86.255
netname: LEASEWEB
descr: LeaseWeb
descr: P.O. Box 93054
descr: 1090BB AMSTERDAM
descr: Netherlands
Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy’s attorney, has already hinted that instead of being forced to comply with the judges ruling to track user activities that it would instead merely cut off access by users in the United States.
“It is likely that TorrentSpy would turn off access to the U.S. before tracking its users,” Rothken said. “If this order were allowed to stand, it would mean that Web sites can be required by discovery judges to track what their users do even if their privacy policy says otherwise.”
“The court’s decision could have a chilling effect on e-commerce and digital entertainment sites,” said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He calls the ruling “unprecedented.” EFF is still reviewing the court’s decision, but von Lohmann calls what he’s seen so far a “troubling court order.”
This is believed to be the first time a judge has ordered a defendant to log visitor activity and then hand over the information to the plaintiff.
“In general, a defendant is not required to create new records to hand over in discovery,” von Lohmann said. “We shouldn’t let Web site logging policies be set by litigation.”
Either way, the fact that the US is trying to regulate the conduct of a site in ANOTHER SOVEREIGN COUNTRY is maddening. I know the US would never put up with it if it was to happen in the reverse but, with a lame duck president and a Congress beholden to the whims of big business piloting the ship I think we’ll be lost at sea for a while.
I just hope we don’t end up with some sort of Disney-like, family-friendly version of the internet here in the US, where porn, file-sharing sites, and any other objectionable material goes the way of gambling and becomes banished from our shores. It’s a slippery slope, and I think it just may happen one law at a time.
digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/TorrentSpy_may_cut_of_access_to_US_visitors’;
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Guess it’s time to use newsgroups and/or switch to a site that won’t cave into demands such as the Pirate Bay. They would probably give the judge the middle finger.
Or just stay off public tracker sites which is advice I highly recommend.
@ commenter #! – torrentspy isn’t caving if they cut off access
torrentspy is saying fine if you want us to be big bro we’ll take our biz elsewhere
Hopefully other international businesses start following suit and cutting off access to the United States this would isolate the United states allowing other countries to mold the internet in a much more suitable way.
@MRsed sites like YouTube but then do it ourselves with sites ba sed abroad. Its hypocritical to say the least.
Exactly we trip out when countries like Thailand ask for content to be removed from US ba
ive havnt used TS for a while now so im glad that if things go bad in this bullshit ruling it wont hurt me much
This will go to the supreme court. If it was JUST filesharing involved then it would be a different matter but it WILL affect other legal business practices as well on the net. So I do not believe that this will not go unchallanged.
I hope you’re right.
The problem with defying the US in this case is that they will arrest you if you ever come to the US or any of it’s possessions. They already did this with the CEO of a payment processor who’s company was accepting payments from the US for online gambling. He is a UK resident who was nabbed in the US while on a business trip. See also recent cases where the US has extradited individuals for hacking and copyright violations from other countries such as Australia.
One solution to this problem is for other _countries_ to give the US the middle finger in response to requests for extradition. I fear we may have to wait quite a while for this to happen as only a handful of countries in the world today seem to have a backbone. Russia comes to mind as one who is more than willing to give the USA the middle finger though that didn’t help Dimitri Skylarov a few years back. Iceland is another (gave a new home to Bobby Fischer after the US tried to extradite him from Japan for playing chess in a country the US had sanctions against at the time).
Cutting the U.S. loose would make an impact and that’s what’s needed to raise the eyebrows of congress that half of what they may do in their own homes is considered illegal or is the result of another country. The fact is our economy isn’t worth being tied into as much anymore either. There’s a lot of things that we’ve had the luxury of taking for granted that we could loose access to.
Btw – there is software designed for countries that restrict free speech on the internet. It’s ironic but it works just as well in the U.S. for accessing content that’s restricted here from overseas.