The content industry can scratch another notch into its
legal gun this week, after BitTorrent tracker TorrentSpy announced that it has
voluntarily shut down as of last Monday.
“We have decided on our own, not due to any court order or
agreement, to bring the TorrentSpy.com search engine to an end,” reads a
message that is all that remains of
the beleaguered tracker. “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.”
Compared to many of its peers, TorrentSpy’s history is an
unusually turbulent one. Many trackers meet their end suddenly, but TorrentSpy
was not so lucky; instead, it faced a protracted battle with its foes, fending
off a seemingly endless
horde of litigation and skullduggery. The site’s legal woes were hallmarked
by the discovery that the MPAA paid Robert Anderson, a former advertising
partner with the site, $15,000
for a valuable cache of inside information he had obtained after hacking an
administrator’s e-mail account, including messages, banking information,
passwords, and even parts of the site’s source code.
TorrentSpy’s actions complicated its legal case, however, as
court records found the site destroyed evidence and retroactively removed
references to piracy on its forums. At one point, it blanked
out names of popular movies with censor-like blackouts. Posts containing
references to movies like “Spiderman 3” were edited – sometimes months after
they were written – to something similar to “[some movie 1].”
Eventually, TorrentSpy lost
its legal case, when U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper entered a
default judgment against the site and its owners for conduct she considered
“obstreperous.”
MPAA Anti-Piracy Director John Malcolm took issue with TorrentSpy’s
“characterization” of its closure, noticing that its “voluntary decision
conveniently ignores the fact that after two years of intense litigation by the
major Hollywood studios, a federal court found TorrentSpy liable for copyright
infringement.”
Malcolm claims TorrentSpy’s shutdown – as well as the
nine-figure judgment entered against the site’s owners following the MPAA’s
legal triumph – is a big victory for content creators, even if the MPAA and its
ilk have a long road ahead of them. “Content providers can't afford to sit by
and do nothing,” said Malcolm in an interview
with Ars Technica. “We've seen some
successes, but there is lots of work ahead of us.”