TorrentSpy Must Preserve Data In RAM For MPAA 489
Transient writes "Reaffirming a magistrate's earlier decision, a federal judge has ordered TorrentSpy to begin keeping server logs as it defends itself against an MPAA lawsuit. In her opinion, Judge Florence-Marie Cooper interpreted federal discovery rules broadly. ' Judge Cooper took issue with TorrentSpy's argument that data in RAM is not "stored." She noted RAM's function as primary storage and that the storage of data in RAM — even if not permanently archived — makes it electronically stored information governed by federal discovery rules.' Given that TorrentSpy has limited access for users in the US, the ruling may be moot. But it does set a precedent for other, similar cases. 'Under this interpretation, any data stored in RAM could be subject to a subpoena, as at a basic level it is a "medium from which information can be obtained" just like a hard drive. '"
so hand them a stick of RAM (Score:5, Funny)
Re:so hand them a stick of RAM (Score:5, Funny)
Bah, move the servers offshore. (Score:3, Funny)
The reason? The broker in question is one of the few who has not yet fled to the free market of international waters. They kept their servers in the US. Lesson 1. Globalism is not just for the big boys. In fact its friend
Re:Bah, move the servers offshore. (Score:5, Informative)
According to United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea [wikipedia.org], passed in 1982, does not allow artificial islands to become sovereign nations. Sealand may have a valid claim to sovereignty before 1982, but any new attempts at creating a new nation will have to be based on a natural land mass.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You need to care for the rules of the UN as you are bound by the laws of your present nation.
As most nations, with the USofA in a leading role, have signed up to international treaties giving the United Nations it's power you are bound to follow the lead of your government.
So the trick is to first become a national of a country that does not recognise the powers of the UN and then start your own Offshore Platform nation.
Re:Bah, move the servers offshore. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's just it, isn't it? Claiming of territory in space is governed by some UN treaty as I recall. But that doesn't matter. If I go and somehow colonize Mars right now, I'm vulnerable to anybody who might want to take it from me. The only solution is to arm Mars to defend it, at which point any aggressor can either fight and lose, or fight and lose far more than Mars is worth to them. Either case makes it illogical to try and capture Mars, and therefore they have to work with Mars, not just invade it.
This is precisely why the world politica is divided into two groups: Nuclear and non-nuclear powers. If a country is a nuclear power, the rules change, because that country can inflict substantial damage to you, more than the country itself is probably worth.
Re:Bah, move the servers offshore. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Umm ... unless I'm missing something ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Empire [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Bah, move the servers offshore. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:so hand them a stick of RAM (Score:5, Funny)
That sounds like a job for SELinux. Lock the system down so hard it doesn't allow root logins at all, and logins under the id that the servers are running under. Have all that become enabled, say, five minutes after boot, or that it starts enabled and must be disabled from the boot command line during boot.
Make sure the system responds with an error message that explains all this if you try to login as one of the protected accounts...that to login you have to reboot the server.
Re:so hand them a stick of RAM (Score:5, Insightful)
It might be easer to explain to the judge that sound is a moving pressure wave stored in air for a very short time from the time he says something to the time someone hears it. I need him to preserve the sound waves in his house from yesterday for permanent record. It may contain evidence of a copyright violation.
Re:so hand them a stick of RAM (Score:5, Interesting)
the problem here is(are) the law(s), not the judge's interpretation.
copyright is completely out of control, and *NO* reasonable discussion on any issue regarding rights for copyright holders has merit (IMHO) until the copyright terms are fixed - meaning, significantly reduced. I don't advocate copyright elimination - it is valid and useful thing to have - just that the tampering with the law by these big companies has given them exactly the opposite that they expected - they have people who don't take it seriously because it is so far skewed against the public interest.
On a long enough time scale, everything balances.
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The way I see it is it is entirely impractical. Take for example the Judge's Cell Phone or Fax Machine. Both buffer and convert digital to analog and analog to digital. Care to impliment a way to permanantly capture and record all data transversing the RAM in these devices. Capturing the transient data in a server memory is equaly burdensome and useless.
If you want tetrab
Re:so hand them a stick of RAM (Score:4, Insightful)
Typical (Score:3, Interesting)
"It's en dem ma-sheeens! We git da masheeen, then we git who was a-stealin our movies! We will git us sum cypherers to figger out dis and weee'l put 'em all in jail!"
Ok, they don't all talk like that I'm sure. But you get my point. This is ridiculous and this judge and others that put this little gem of a ruling together should be openly ridiculed at every opportunity.
Soo.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Soo.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Soo.... (Score:5, Informative)
If this turns out to be expensive, TorrentSpy can make the MPAA pay for it. I'm not going to guess how probable that would be, but the option is certainly there to have the MPAA pay a few bucks for worthless IP information.
Re:Soo.... (Score:5, Funny)
The cost of paper may build up to something considerable after the first couple seconds...
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Hippie FUD (Score:4, Informative)
The other 97% of deforestation is due to the locals and the Brazilian government. ~60% cattle ranches, ~30-33% agriculture (~30% subsistence, ~1-3% commercial), and ~3% urbanization. (I found a pretty good link here, which has a nice pie graph, which is where I'm pulling these numbers since I'm not at my home computer with all my bookmarks: http://www.mongabay.com/brazil.html [mongabay.com])
So anyway, stop blindly believing hippie FUD from the the 60s and do a few minutes' worth of research on Google. Shit, I just looked at the wikipedia article and even they have a pretty good section on Amazon deforestation. So yeah, go ahead and use all the paper you want, it's actually GOOD for the environment and has been for the better part of a century. (Oh, and totally unrelated, but if you're still believing the hippie FUD about nuclear power, you'll want to do research on that too.
Re:Hippie FUD (Score:4, Funny)
I will not make funny comments on
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Then the judge should have said that, and not obfuscated it to the point of making the judge sound incompetent to be making decisions in this field.
Of course, then the question becomes: where do you draw the line on what ephemeral data can a court require to be logged? If you don't draw the line somewhere, the storage requirements for even a week's worth of transactions and data for some places could well exceed the entire world's combined pe
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Re:Soo.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine the implications if it is determined that memories are stored by some measurable physicality in the brain. With such an advancement, under this precedent, memories become subpoena-able.
The government should fear this as the boilerplate "I do not recall" answers will then become impeachable testimony.
Whoops! (Score:2)
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power failure (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:power failure (Score:5, Insightful)
If you "forgot" to pay your colocation bill and they turned off your servers, that might work. You could claim you couldn't pay the bill because of all the money you are spending on lawyers.
Oh, sure, no problem (Score:2)
Okay, no problem. I'll just shut the server down and pull the hard drive and memory DIMMs out for you. Go ahead and "obtain" whatever information you like.
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The decision does not mean that past RAM contents must somehow magically be retained, it merely rejects the defense that because IP addresses are currently only stored in RAM, that they are not possible to save. So basically in this case, they must start logging from RAM into a file. If they disobey that order, it is essentially destroying evidence from that point forward. This is no different from
If I understand correctly... (Score:2, Insightful)
Evidence destruction ? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Evidence destruction ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Evidence destruction ? (Score:5, Informative)
int main() {
char buf[255];
puts("Enter something:");
fgets(buf, sizeof(buf), stdin);
return strlen(buf);
}
where on the disk did the contents of buf get stored (assuming we have no virtual memory)?
Re:Evidence destruction ? (Score:5, Funny)
It's impossible to say because your seven line program contains at least one bug. (I'm assuming that the presented program is C and not some imaginary language).
Firstly, although you've correctly specified that main() should return an "int" you are actually returning a value of "size_t" which may or may not be defined as "int", depending on the platform. Secondly, you haven't checked the return value of fgets(). On error, fgets() returns NULL. This isn't necessarily the same as the nul character so depending on the platform, strlen() may fail (possibly even catastrophically on certain machines, such as the DeathStation 5000).
You've used the strlen() function without including its proper header.
Lastly, although this isn't really an error but it does demonstrate your inexperience, you have enclosed "buf" in parenthesis in the sizeof expression. Remember, sizeof is an operator not a function. The only reason you would ever use parenthesis in conjunction with sizeof is if you were asking for the size of a datatype. For example "sizeof(int)" or "sizeof(*char)". Using parenthesis any other time would be equivalent to expressing a simple sum as "(1) + (2) == (3)". Not incorrect, but pointless.
A more correct program might be...
Remember, C isn't for amateurs. That's why high-level languages were invented. To demonstrate how difficult it is to effectively program in C, I've deliberately left a bug in of my own as well as a potentially confusing design issue. See if you can find them.
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But anyway:
It's impossible to say because your seven line program contains at least one bug. (I'm assuming that the presented program is C and not some imaginary language).
If you can't determine intent from those seven lines (and hence the answer to the question) you truly are retarded. Must be wonderful to actually be dumber than the average C compiler.
Firstly, although you'
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does it not also have to exist on the hard drive in some fashion also
Nope. The ram info can be anything that's taking place during the operation of software. For instance, the x,y coordinates of your mouse pointer. In the case of the TorrentSpy server, it would be inbound http requests and their source IP addresses. The TortrentSpy admins have apparently configured their HTTP server to not log these requests to files on the hard drive. The MPAA is trying another approach for gathering this information
White Board (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't the court grasp the transient nature of the content of RAM?
-Peter
Re:White Board (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:White Board (Score:5, Insightful)
You CAN Preserve a White Board (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this mean they can subpoena the contents of the white board in conference nine at 7:23 AM on June the 13, 2005?
YES, if the court gives you notice that you must preserve everything that is written on the whiteboards in all conference rooms, then they will expect you to have it preserved, and produce it when ordered.
Take a picture, log the contents, don't erase it - whatever you need to do to preserve the information. Saying "But I erased it!" isn't going to fly when you are subject to a prior order to NOT erase it.
Why can't the court grasp the transient nature of the content of RAM?
It sounds like the company was saying "But I really don't have it, it's just in RAM". That doesn't mean you don't have the information.
Note that this is a prospective discovery order - YOU WILL HAVE THE INFORMATION IN YOUR POSSESION, I REALIZE IT'S TRANSITORY AND YOU NORMALLY DON"T PRESERVE IT, BUT YOU CAN PRESERVE IT, AND I'M ORDERING YOU TO PRESERVE IT.
What's so hard about that?
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I don't get the attempted denial of the request in the first place. Yes, for space reasons you might not log traffic on your site, but when a judge tells you to, why the hell would you think that it being in RAM and not disk would make it immune from subpeona? Just buy another hard drive and start logging the relevant data.
And if you actually gave them a actual recording of all the data going into RAM in a way that could be rep
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They are not saying "produce the contents of the RAM from such-and-such a date", they're saying "this would have been evidence that could have been subpoenaed had it been preserved, so in future you will preserve it so that we can subpoena it if necessary".
Silly (Score:5, Insightful)
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Unless as the IT guy you want an intimate knowledge of life behind bars, you preserve and present the data to the court in meaningful way. It's your ass that on the line, not your boss's.
What I want to know... (Score:2, Interesting)
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Simple answer - The MPAA asked for it (no doubt doing their best not to burst out laughing), describing it as absolutely critical to making their case, with probably a snipe about how those damned pirates would try to get out of it by claiming they couldn't realistically get to it.
As for the suitable means to archive it, we don't really need to ask that here on Slashdot, because we already know the answer - You
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More important, what law is it exactly that give the MPAA the right to force others to change the way in which they conduct business. Maybe she can order them to quarter foreign soldiers, er hire MPAA sysops, too, just in case someone starts sharing movies.
Can I order a breathalyser be installed in her car bec
Just a thought... (Score:5, Interesting)
hehe (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, what?! (Score:5, Funny)
I guess it's time to buy stock in storage companies. I wonder if this also applies to cache RAM? There could be an infinite loop in there somewhere...
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I am going to subpoena the contents your your CPU's register for the date of August 1, 2007 between the hours of 6:00am EST and 6:01am EST. I will require it as a hardcopy please, thank you for your continued cooperation.
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And then what about the cache in the hard drive?
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"Sir I direct your attention to page 0x1A86FB2 of the memory dump. Do you or do you not recognize writing the bits 101100011010111101?"
Need more disk space now? (Score:5, Insightful)
so we need faster processors and bigger hard drives to handle the extra load.
A normal log may not be that big, but when you get to a few months full of RAM logs for a busy server... I think this precedent will get overturned when they find out just what they are asking for.
I want to to write down every single thought you have for the next 10 weeks...
Re:Need more disk space now? (Score:5, Funny)
What about costs? (Score:5, Insightful)
For this the costs would be expensive.
There are two ways to archive this:
1. By snapshotting the ram.
2. By rewriting the server code.
By snapshotting the ram, it would require a program with root access to snap this and lots of data to be archive.
By rewriting the server code, it would take months to rewrite it properly and test it. Then they would to license the IP2location database to perform lookups on the IP address filter out US addresses. I suspect that this filtering would require one or two more computers to perform this.
Not surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
Which makes sense. Imagine that I do all my shady accounting on some Post-Its, then turn their contents into a bunch of spreadsheets and a ledger that look legit. If my accounting documentation is subpoenaed and I don't produce those Post-Its, and the court finds out about their existence, I am in deep shit for destruction of evidence and/or failure to keep required records. I certainly wouldn't get far with a claim that the Post-Its were a "temporary storage medium" or something.
I believe the fact that TorrentSpy is being compelled to keep server logs by the MPAA is fucked up on a few levels. I just wanted to point out that the last part of the summary is not as profound or earth-shaking as it might seem.
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Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Worse yet, what about a digital calculator.....you can't use one. You need to have one that prints out, etc.
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If my accounting documentation is subpoenaed and I don't produce those Post-Its, and the court finds out about their existence, I am in deep shit for destruction of evidence and/or failure to keep required records.
Completely wrong. "Accidental" destruction of records is EXTREMELY common during the discovery process. I'd wager that in any complex case some records are ALWAYS lost. Saying "sorry I tossed those post-its, but it's all in the ledger" really is good enough unless the court has a lot of evidence to prove you're deceiving them. Basically, in this case it would consist of witnesses saying you were doing a dual accounting system with the post-its. And even then, so what? It's still a tough case to push for de
Now try a whiteboard (Score:3, Insightful)
Do they too fall under this ruling? After all, they do "store" information, for a while, and then it gets wiped. Do you think that companies should preserve ALL whiteboard writings.
What about errors, if I write something and make a spelling error, I erase it and retype it. Should that too be recorded?
What about the information of time. A whiteboard is changed over time as you add new data to it, this timeline could be important, WHEN was the information on the whiteboard added, the time the line "Make sur
Very surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
What's really fucked up is how this U.S. court magistrate, and now Federal Judge Cooper, think they can order new evidence to be created after-the-fact. Not to mention how fucked up it is that a U.S. court thinks it can give any order outside their jurisdiction to TorrentSpy located in the Netherlands. And how further fucked up they must think TorrentSpy must be to violate European privac
Let's be clear (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent up (Score:3, Insightful)
C coding standards need a rewrite (Score:2, Funny)
free command: illegal under the dmcaa
memory leaks: standard operating procedure
dangling pointers: stool pigeons
Um, isn't this some pretty heavy spin??? (Score:5, Insightful)
The magistrate judge didn't buy that argument, and in her opinion reaffirming the magistrate's order, neither did Judge Florence-Marie Cooper. Judge Cooper took issue with TorrentSpy's argument that data in RAM is not "stored." She noted RAM's function as primary storage and that the storage of data in RAM--even if not permanently archived--makes it electronically stored information governed by federal discovery rules.
Judge: "Choose to do so from this point on."
RAM isn't exactly relevant. This isn't some kind of temporary storage situation. This is a deliberate decision on the part of the software author. Now if you want to claim rights are being trodden upon, be my guest. But claiming that all RAM is now state's evidence is a stretch.
Re:Um, isn't this some pretty heavy spin??? (Score:5, Insightful)
While it is unlikely that always logging ALL data in RAM will become a federal requirement, it is quite possible that this will turn into one of those things that everybody has to violate in order to function. The result of this will be that someone, somewhere will be permanently fucked by a ruling based on this. Yes, the law might be changed after this, but only after someone's life has been permanently fucked with.
Remember the high-school senior who got a blowjob from a 15 year old? He's doing time, because a law designed to catch sex offenders was badly written. The law was changed in response to his conviction, but it was too late for him. He's still in jail, the football scholarship is now out of the question, and he will have a criminal record.
I'm paranoid because too many lawyers and politicians and people in general have abused bad laws for their own gain.
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The first and last one of those can be alleviated by a Governor, and a good one would do it. These kinds of cases are what Presidential and Gubernatorial pardons are made f
It's not the DIMM's being subpoena'd (Score:3, Informative)
judges are not dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't about RAM, folks (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see a different problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
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SSL Keys (Score:3, Insightful)
I fear that the above scenario is not that far off.
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What is worrying me is this: I visit some website at a HTTPS url or I login somewhere using ssh. Later the cops say "give us the SSL keys for that exchange"... But because I ought to know that the SSL keys might be of interest - I should have kept them
No.
There is no obligation for you to store/save/retain anything until after the police or a lawyer tells you that it is of interest.
This is one of the reason why businesses setup data retention policies such that after X days, [information] is shredded or wiped. That way, when they get sued or investigated, they can honestly say "we don't have it and we aren't obstructing justice because our policy is to scrap [information] after X days."
Just because you could save [information], but never have, doesn't me
Summary sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
The judge wants them to start logging IP addresses. But a judge can't just order anyone to do anything they feel like, there has to be some precedent or law saying they can. This judge said in legal terms, stuff in RAM is stored data. Then he applied rules based on law that covers stored data.
It's like if a company has a policy to burn documents every night, but the judge orders them not to burn documents until the end of the case. There's no expectation that burnt documents can magically be unburnt.
Just Suppose... (Score:4, Interesting)
How about giving them a complete memory dump of RAM, letting them sort out what the data is that interests them? Can the judge require them to preserve it in pretty formats?
This whole order is such an overreach by this judge, and the US Judicial system, that an immediate halt should be put to it this very instant.
And just suppose, btw for the sake of argument, that the country were TS is located prohibits export of personal data due to privacy laws? Then who wins?
This Just In (Score:5, Funny)
RAM log (Score:5, Funny)
2007.08.28 15:40 set bit 1243434
2007.08.28 15:40 set bit 1243435
2007.08.28 15:40 cleared bit 1243436
2007.08.28 15:40 set bit 1243437
Obviously guilty!
Rank this Judge (Score:5, Interesting)
Who is responsible? (Score:5, Interesting)
In spite of all of the ramblings to the contrary, it isn't technically difficult to add a logging feature to a piece of s/w to collect and store IP addresses, or other sorts of data currently only held in RAM. This assumes that the operators of the service can either modify that s/w themselves, or contract the vendor of said s/w to add this logging feature. In the case of proprietary s/w, with licensing provisions prohibiting reverse-engineering or modification, the latter may be the only recourse.
Now, lets suppose the operators of TorrentSpy contact the vendor, request that logging be added per the court's request and the vendor replies, "No".
Re:Put down the crack pipe and pick up a book (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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The only real solution is to become the people writing the laws. Support your local pirate party, I guess.
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"The only real solution is to become the people writing the laws. Support your local pirate party, I guess."
That's just,
You could, you know..., not participate in the illegal distribution of copyrighted materials?
How hard is that? Stop intentionally participating in the illegal distribution of copyrighted materials. Don't push the button to connect to that torrent
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I.E.
Process A is in RAM, writing to a log
Process B is writing to the log what process A is going through writing
Process A sees B and starts logging what B is doing
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IANAL, but the legal argument I believe is that RAM is a physical representation of information, even if temporary, and therefore it is subject to discovery.
I could be wrong though, because IANAL like most people here. It is funny that a lot of people are calling the judge an idiot for not understanding the technology when this is more of a legal issue (which supposedly the judge is an expert in.)
(I