14 DAY TRIAL // Although the court ruled that TorrentSpy must pay a fine of $110 million to MPAA and some of you thought that the lawsuit was finally over, it seems like the dispute will continue because the BitTorrent website decided to appeal the decision. According to AFP, a TorrentSpy lawyer said they would appeal the court ruling, so the lawsuit will go on. The MPAA saw the ruling as a real victory and said that it should be the best example of what a copyright infringement service can get in case it doesn't agree to comply with the law.
However, TorrentSpy's lawyers said that the judge ruling has nothing to do with copyright infringement and the $110 million fine was a result of the fact that the BitTorrent website had refused to provide information about its users. Some months ago, the court asked TorrentSpy to disclose private details about the users accessing the website, but the service administrators promptly refused, pointing to the internal guidelines which protected the privacy of the users. In order to comply with the court demands but to protect the users' identity, TorrentSpy was forced to ban the access in the U.S., so it instantly became a non-US BitTorrent website.
Besides that, the TorrentSpy attorney explained that the matter of TorrentSpy infringing copyright is still unclear since the court ruling was given for the refusal of providing user details. Moreover, he made an interesting analogy between TorrentSpy and web search engines.
TorrentSpy describes itself as a BitTorrent search service that allows users to find torrent files over the web. Accusing TorrentSpy of copyright infringement is something similar to accusing search engines of the same thing because they link to illegal websites, the TorrentSpy attorney explained according to various sources.