The Funded sued for the Identity of John Doe
The funded is being sued to provide the identity of a John Doe that left a negative comment about the VC fund EDF Ventures, a mid-sized venture capital fund in Ann Arbor, Michigan. While I am not a lawyer, and usually work in IP, especially Bittorrent, I can’t help but think of what was going on with a number of bittorrent sites that took the same tactic as The Funded does. Not collecting IP addresses and other information about the people who use the site.
Both Venture Beat and Techcruch cover some of this and the comment at both sites about how the Funded runs their operation is:
TheFunded does not store IP addresses, email addresses, or any other personal information associated with a Member account in any database or any file system operated by the company.
Now torrent spy tried to do the same thing, however, they were beaten down in the courts, and got slapped with a huge fine because they refused to keep records of who was using the site. When torrent spy was court ordered to log their users, where they came from, and did not comply, the 30K summary judgment against them basically caused them to shutter their doors.
Not saying that the funded will face the same issue, there are different facts about the site, but if I was a lawyer, this is the first thing that I would be asking for, those ever precious logs, with all the information in them. Since a court case already exists, albeit in the bittorrent lawsuit drama, the funded might be on shaky ground here with the not storing personal information or file system, meaning they don’t store a lot of information in the web server logs. (This is also the assumption that I am working under here as well based on their statement).
It will be interesting to see then how this works out, if the assumption holds true, then the next step is that the Funded will be required by court order to start keeping more information on their users. This one will be interesting to see work out.
Tags: the funded, logs, personal, information, data, retention, bittorrent, torrent spy, courts, precedent
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