Pay Hollywood $110M, TorrentSpy ordered
p2pnet news | MPAA News:- The major movie studios, which together with the labels were yesterday were crowing over Los Angeles legislation which makes building owners responsible if tenants are caught making counterfeits on their properties, are also cock-a-hoop over another so-called victory, this time against the owners of a bankrupt online site.
A federal judge in Tinseltown made a $110 million judgment in favour of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Universal City Studios and Warner Bros Entertainment Inc against Valence Media’s Torrentspy for the alleged infringement of copyrighted motion pictures and television shows.
It also made a permanent injunction, “prohibiting defendant from further infringing any of the studios’ copyrightedworks”.
In a farewell post, “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,” says the site, going on >>>
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
It finishes with a quote from Justice William O. Douglas:
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.
The powerful, multi-billion-dollar movie industry, which continues to report eye-popping, record-breaking revenues, claims it’s being devastated by the likes of Torrentspy.
“Over the past few months the TorrentSpy crew has made several drastic changes to their website,” said p2pnet last year, going on, “They’ve stopped hosting .torrent files, and even banned US visitors.
“However, this isn’t enough, according to the MPAA which has filed another complaint and asked the judge for sanctions against the popular BitTorrent site. In August, a federal judge ordered TorrentSpy to log all user data stored in RAM.”
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.Stumble It!
crowing – RIAA, MPAA, penalise property owners, May 7, 2008
bankrupt online site – Hollywood kills TorrentSpy, March 27, 2008
eye-popping, record-breaking – Hollywood Christmas goldmine, December 27, 2007
p2pnet – MPAA after TorrentSpy. Again, October 12, 2007
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May 8th, 2008 at 7:46 am
Yes I’d think that would do it bankruptcy wise. I’d take whatever I had left and leave the country. I had no idea that torrent hosting was such a lucrative business however. You can’t tell me they made all that from advertising? Or if they didn’t make much, why such a preposterous fine which stretches the bounds of incredulousness beyond belief? Could anyone even imagine how much one million is? No. Perhaps they were expected to drop dead of a heart attack, but if it were me I would be unphased due to the sheer stupidity of it all.
May 8th, 2008 at 7:59 am
And yet another judge got bribed by the EBs bribery card!
Judges come to your senses, the EBs want to destroy everything!
May 8th, 2008 at 8:22 am
sorry to see them go but I love how they stuck to their guns and refused to hand over personal information.
May 8th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
With all the progress that’s being made (court rulings against the music industry and such), is sad to see when something like this happens
May 11th, 2008 at 6:47 am
The music industry cartel plays their songs for free on our TVs and radios, in our cars, and in the shops on a 24 hour basis and then they sue for millions those who choose not to buy them. They are crooks. An mp3 is worth nothing, it can be reproduced at zero cost at no loss to the record industry cartel and if I was TorrentSpy I would not pay the criminals the shit off my shoe.