"A court decision reached last month but under seal until Friday could force Web sites to track visitors if the sites become defendants in a lawsuit."
On May 29th a federal judge, Jacqueline Chooljian, from the Central District of California in L.A. ordered TorrentSpy--a Bittorrent (BT) search engine--to "create logs detailing users' activities on the site."
In TorrentSpy's privacy policy, it states that it will never track visitors without their consent and Chooljian "granted a stay of the order on Friday to allow TorrentSpy to file an appeal" no later than June 12, according to TorrentSpy's attorney, Ira Rothken.
Rothken states that "It is likely that TorrentSpy would turn off access to the U.S. before tracking its users" and "If this order were allowed to stand, it would mean that Web sites can be required by discovery judges to track what their users do even if their privacy policy says otherwise."
The case began when the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) sued TorrentSpy (and some others) in February of '06 for facilitating the use of torrents to download pirated files.
EFF's attorney, Fred von Lohmann, calls the ruling "unprecedented" and from his continuing review of the case says that it is a "troubling court order" where "We shouldn't let Web site logging policies be set by litigation."
Source: C|Net News.com
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Originally Posted by pastry
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