It seems that a court has ruled that Internet search engines must create and store every key stroke and every draft ever create, even if not sent. In Columbia v. Bunnell, a movie studio sued a search engine for copyright infringement. As part of the lawsuit's discovery process, the movie studio wants all search engine user information.
This is disturbing, because this means if courts can demand user information from search engines, all Internet search engines will be required to keep logs of every Internet visitor to the search engine site, even if the search engine did not intend to develop this capacity. If there was no mechanism to capture and store the information, the search engine will be required to develop this capacity.
This might apply to bloggers down the road, because most good blog providers and bloggers have search capabilities. Watch out for court and government control of the Internet and the Blogosphere.
Movies Studios v. TorrentSpy
On June 22, 2007, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) urged a California court Friday to overturn a dangerous ruling that would require an Internet search engine to create and store logs of its users' activities as part of electronic discovery obligations in a civil lawsuit.
The ruling came in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by motion picture studios against TorrentSpy, a popular search engine that indexes materials made publicly available via the Bit Torrent file sharing protocol. TorrentSpy has never logged its visitors' Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Notwithstanding this explicit privacy policy, a federal magistrate judge has now ordered TorrentSpy to activate logging and turn the logged data over to the studios.
"This unprecedented ruling has implications well beyond the file sharing context,? said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "Giving litigants the power to rewrite their opponent's privacy policies poses a risk to all Internet users.?
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