This is ludicrous to anyone who knows a jot about computing:

A website which facilitated the online exchange of films, music and TV programmes without permission has lost a US copyright case.

TorrentSpy was taken to court by the Motion Picture Association of America.

A judge made a default ruling in favour of the MPAA after she said the site’s operators had tampered with evidence.

The site had ignored an order to retain server logs and the unique online addresses of computers which traded files using the BitTorrent program.

The ruling could have personal privacy implications because the information TorrentSpy had been told to retain was held in Random Access Memory of computers.

…

The judge then asked for information from the RAM in their computers but the defendants failed in their attempt to argue the data was temporary and therefore could not be retained.

The defendants’ conduct was “obstreperous,” Judge Florence-Marie Cooper wrote in her decision.

“They have engaged in widespread and systematic efforts to destroy evidence and have provided false testimony under oath in a effort to hide evidence of such destruction.

“A substantial number of items of evidence have been destroyed,” she wrote. “Defendants were on notice that this information would be of importance in this case.”

TorrentSpy’s lawyer Ira Rothken said his clients had concerns about protecting users’ privacy.

TorrentSpy is expected to appeal Judge Cooper’s decision.

Darn tootin’ they should appeal; I’d have been inclined to hexdump /dev/kmem and print it just to keep them happy – per gigabyte of RAM that would be around 200,000 double-sided sheets at 66lpp 80cpl and would weigh about 4000Kg; not to mention the euro-privacy implications if the machine is hosted with other users, or virtualised.

I have a mental image of Judge Cooper which includes a typewriter, carbons, and onion-skin paper…