It may have ‘voluntarily’ closed its controversial online doors on March 24 of this year, but BitTorrent indexing service TorrentSpy is still stuck firmly in the legal sights of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
TorrentSpy hit for $111 million USD in MPAA copyright infringement case. Image: TorrentSpy/Zzzack/Flickr.
More pointedly, a Los Angeles district judge has this week ruled that TorrentSpy site owner Justin Bunnell and operator Valence Media LLC are to pay a total of $111 million USD in fines for the facilitation of copyright infringement across a multitude of multimedia files posted through the now defunct Net service.
In giving her decision, U.S. District Judge Florence Marie-Cooper said that the defendants were to pay a maximum $30,000 USD for each of the 3,699 movie and television infringements brought before the court by the MPAA.
“This substantial money judgment sends a strong message about the illegality of these sites,” commented MPAA chairman Dan Glickman in a statement related to the fine, which is pursuant to the penalty structure officially laid out in the Copyright Act.
Tech site Wired News reports that the MPAA’s case against TorrentSpy was strengthened by internal site e-mails and other communications that were supplied by an unnamed hacker -- who allegedly received a payment of $15,000 USD for his services.
Along with the substantial financial penalty, the judge also ordered that TorrentSpy remain closed permanently. The site closed at the end of March after defaulting in the MPAA case when it refused to break user privacy protocols by delivering internal records to the court.
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