The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) won a default judgment against the operators of the TorrentSpy.com web site in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, located in Los Angeles, with the U.S. District Court Judge holding that, although TorrentSpy’s servers were housed in the Netherlands, TorrentSpy must preserve server data logs held in random access memory containing user IP addresses, discussion forum postings about the trading of movies and moderator identities. TorrentSpy, which provided a central location to find files distributed on BitTorent peer-to-peer networks destroyed those records.
The judge in that case wrote that TorrentSpy “engaged in widespread and systematic efforts to destroy evidence and have provided false testimony under oath in an effort to hide evidence of such destruction.”
If this ruling stands, where you surf and what you download may be discoverable in third-party lawsuits that you know nothing about.
And, don’t try to sneak out of the country with your computer. Adam Liptak wrote in the New York Times that the border is a privacy-free zone and the government, namely the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency, has the right to take a look at your laptop computer, open up the folders on that computer and peer inside as it can do with your luggage.
So downloading the latest movie release or any other illegal content onto your computer and watching it for free may be no less risk-free as bringing a video camera into your local movie house and taping that film.
