• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, February 6, 2009

In a closely watched case, the defunct BitTorrent search site TorrentSpy has asked a federal appellate court to reverse a judge's decision ordering the site to pay movie studios $111 million for copyright infringement.

TorrentSpy argues that Judge Florence-Marie Cooper in Los Angeles wrongly sanctioned the company for having purged records of visitors' IP addresses rather than break a promise to protect users' privacy.

"The district court's rulings are contrary to national policies in favor of Internet innovation and promotion, online free speech, privacy, and vigorous competition," TorrentSpy argued in its appellate brief, filed this week with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Cooper summarily ended the case in favor of the movie studios last year. She ordered TorrentSpy to pay damages of $30,000 for each of 3,699 instances of copyright infringement.

TorrentSpy's lawyer, Ira Rothken, said the decision to sanction the company by ending the case without a trial deprived it of due process.

In its appellate brief, TorrentSpy also argued that Cooper didn't take into account that the company also enabled people to find non-infringing content. "The district court failed to reach toward a sound balance between the rights of owners of copyrights and the rights of Internet developers like defendants," the company wrote. "Defendants hosted and linked to non-copyrighted torrent files. ... Any alleged connection between defendants and piracy was indirect and secondary."

The ruling appeared to mark the first time a judge ruled against a BitTorrent search site that contested copyright infringement allegations in court. But a similar case is still pending against IsoHunt, a former TorrentSpy rival.

TorrentSpy also is pursuing its own wiretapping claim against the MPAA for allegedly spying on the company. Before the MPAA sued TorrentSpy, the group hired former TorrentSpy employee Rob Anderson to provide them with information.

Anderson hacked into TorrentSpy's system and sent the studios 34 pages worth of emails, including messages about the company's finances. Cooper threw out TorrentSpy's lawsuit on the ground that the emails were not intercepted under the federal Wiretap Act.

TorrentSpy appealed that ruling to the 9th Circuit, and the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation weighed in on TorrentSpy's behalf, filing a friend-of-the-court brief in that case.

Rothken said he anticipated that the 9th Circuit would hear oral arguments on the wiretapping and copyright infringement cases together.

TorrentSpy, which has servers in the Netherlands, stopped accepting U.S. visitors in August 2007. At the time, TorrentSpy said it didn't believe it could adequately protect the privacy of U.S. visitors. The company closed for good last March.