So if you check out this article on ZDNet you’ll see that a Los Angeles judge has ordered TorrentSpy to start logging all site traffic and to turn over all data stored in RAM on their servers. This is the most absurd thing I have ever heard of. The article on ZDNet likens this to having to save post-it notes but it goes far beyond that. I would liken it to a person having to store every single thought that they had. The brain, like the RAM on a computer, works far faster than a pencil, keyboard, or a hard drive. That means that the brain, like the computer, would be forced to work at the speed of your fingers. Can you imagine having to think at a rate of 50 or even 100 word per minute? Absolutely absurd.
Anyway, if you folks at TorrentSpy are reading this, here are my suggestions for you. First of all, absolutely insist that the MPAA have to provide you with all the hardware and any software needed to log this. Secondly, insist that any software they provide you be open source and that it be peer reviewable on the internet. This is to protect you from having the MPAA do anything malicious or illegal. I’d then also get the judge to allow you to only put this logging on half of your servers. You, in good faith, would not modify your network structure to keep those servers from receiving less connections than they can handle. We all know they won’t get that much traffic anyway, they will be completely bogged down. Finally, to show just how absurd logging RAM is, I’d suggest you turn on encryption for all server traffic. Might as well make the MPAA sort through thousands and thousands of pages of factoring data. This will cause server performance to be so slow that these servers will only get a few hits per hour. It would affect very little of your clientel.
Good luck to you TorrentSpy! While I never condone piracy (I do work in the software industry, after all), I believe that the RIAA and MPAA have gotten themselves into their own mess by churning out complete CRAP for the last 10+ years. If they actually put out a decent work, maybe people would pay to see it in the theater and even pay to have a copy at home? A good movie is worth $10-15. But, ninty-nine percent of the movies produced these days aren’t even worth the cost of the film they are stored on.