TorrentSpy Sacked With Huge MPAA Fine

The now-defunct BitTorrent browser TorrentSpy was ordered to puke up $110 million to the MPAA for its involvement in copyright infringement. For each claim against the company, they were charged $30,000.

This bold move is meant to scare the bejesus out of all y'all illegal downloaders out there: No, the MPAA ain't gonna put up with your degenerate habit much longer.

Here's TorrentSpy's kinda lame, passive-aggressive posting on their one-page website:

Friends of TorrentSpy,

We have decided on our own, not due to any court order or agreement, to bring the Torrentspy.com search engine to an end and thus we permanently closed down worldwide on March 24, 2008.

The legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests, and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile. We spent the last two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, defending the rights of our users and ourselves.

Ultimately the Court demanded actions that in our view were inconsistent with our privacy policy, traditional court rules, and International law; therefore, we now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users - permanent shutdown.

It was a wild ride,

The TorrentSpy Team

"Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like." - Justice William O. Douglas

The Big Brother comment at the end is straight-up overkill. C'mon. We've all read 1984. We know this is a Brave New World. No sense in beating it into our heads yet again.

The long and short of it is this: back in February 2006, TorrentSpy was sued. The judge in the case asked for the IP addresses of individual customers. TorrentSpy lied and said those IP addresses weren't available. Once busted in this lie, the judge got pissed and had some strong words:

"Plaintiffs have convinced the Court that their ability to prove their case has been inalterably prejudiced by Defendants' willful spoliation of evidence, making terminating sanctions the only effective recourse," wrote Judge Florence-Marie Cooper in her decision. "The Court has concluded that Defendants' conduct constitutes spoliation and second, that termination of the case in favor of Plaintiffs is the proper sanction."

Ouch.

So are you emptying out your hard drive right now?

[via: Ars Technica]