TorrentSpy Ordered to Log Users’ IPs

On June 27, 2007 in a copyright infringement lawsuit, Columbia Pictures Industries v. Bunnell, No. 06-01093 FMC, pending in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Judge Florence-Marie Cooper ruled that TorrentSpy, a popular search engine that indexes materials made publicly available via the Bit Torrent file sharing protocol, must activate logging and turn the logged data over to the studios, despite its privacy policy. The magistrate judge reasoned that because the info including IP addresses exists in RAM of TorrentSpy’s webservers, it is “electronically stored information” that must be collected and turned over to the studios under the rules of federal discovery.