In an unusual victory for the major Hollywood studios, a federal judge in Los Angeles halted an ongoing lawsuit against the operators of TorrentSpy.com in favor of all six of the Motion Picture Association of America’s member companies.
The MPAA classifies TorrentSpy as one of the world’s most notorious pirate Web sites and claims that the site blatantly contributes to and profits from massive infringement of copyrighted content, including movies, music, and games.
The court imposed the harshest sanction against the TorrentSpy defendants because of their destruction of evidence and subversion of the judicial process. The ruling against TorrentSpy means TorrentSpy operators are liable for copyright infringement, despite the fact that the case did not come to a normal close.
“The court’s decision is a significant victory for MPAA member companies and
sends a potent message to future defendants that this egregious behavior will not be tolerated by the judicial system,” John Malcolm, executive vice president and director of Worldwide Anti-Piracy Operations for the MPAA, said in a statement.
“TorrentSpy is a one-stop shop for copyright infringement,” he went on to say, “and we will continue to aggressively enforce our members’ rights to stop such infringement.”
Destroying Evidence
The evidence the defendants destroyed included forum postings with references to
copyright infringement, site directories referencing copyrighted works, and records of user IP addresses.
Judge Florence-Marie Cooper of the U.S. District Court in the Central District of California ruled that “although termination of a case is a harsh sanction appropriate only in extraordinary circumstance, the circumstances of this case are sufficiently extraordinary to merit such a sanction.”
The court found that the evidence was “not deleted or modified negligently, but intentionally in direct response to the institution of this lawsuit.” Observing that defendants “already had been subjected to lesser sanctions in this case,” including a fine for $30,000 for…