The TorrentSpy judge who is hearing the case has decided that when data hits RAM, it is a log, and therefore must be kept. So the torrentspy response over the weekend was a smart move in keeping American users safe from being tracked and monitored.

“The court holds that data stored in RAM, however temporarily, is electronically stored information,” wrote U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper in her 18-page decision. Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy’s attorney, said that as far as the court order goes, if the company isn’t doing business in the U.S. there isn’t any U.S. records to turn over. Nonetheless, Rothken said TorrentSpy plans to continue the court fight by filing a new appeal with the 9th Circuit. Source: News.com

So what does all this mean then for the average person, well for one, any Usenet site that you latch on to is now going to be obligated to track the movement of users across their systems. Most Usenet providers do not keep logs at this time, if you use a United States hosted Usenet server, think about going overseas, or give up using Usenet to download content.

If you want to use torrentspy, you need to use a proxy outside the USA, there are plenty of them, it does not remove you from the liability of downloading protected content, it just means that you can use torrentspy. NewTeeVee has an excellent piece on that subject here, and it is good info on how to do this.

For torrentspy, it means the loss of their less sophisticated American users, since they no longer operate in America, and you have no idea how to use a proxy, you will need to find another Bittorrent server.

For RIAA, MPAA and others, it means that they have not done much to stop piracy, rather they have driven them to other sites like the Pirate Bay, Mininova, and others.

For everyone else, it means that companies will now be obligated to record all computer transactions, because most if not all logs at some point hit RAM, that means every log, on every system, every transaction, needs to be logged, which is going to choke most companies as few if any are really prepared to look at log management, storage, and otherwise. The general rule of thumb is 90 days for logs, some folks will generate terabytes of logs in that time frame.

People who sell NAS, SANS and log management systems will make money, people will still download stuff, and in general, life will go on. At least torrentspy decided that they had to do something and everyone pretty much so guessed that the ruling today was going to happen the way it did.