Yesterday, the entertainment industry was honored with one of the most important, and unusual, victories against copyright piracy; a federal judge in Los Angeles terminated a lawsuit against TorrentSpy because the web site provided false testimony under oath and hided and destroyed evidence, which made a fair trial impossible.

Thus, Judge Florence-Marie Cooper of U.S. District Court in the Central District of California agreed with the Motion Picture Association of America’s attorneys and decided it was necessary to terminate the case because the popular web site’s operators’ action had impacted the ability for the movie studios to prove their case.

TorrentSpy is a BitTorrent indexing service that helps people find copyrighted material for free on the Internet. TorrrentSpy is one of the largest torrent trackers of the Web and although it doesn’t in fact store the infringing video material on its own web site, it directs people to its locations. Thus, not only that TorrentSpy promotes piracy and copyright infringement, but it also helps users find the infringing files.

The lawsuit that Judge Florence-Marie Cooper of U.S. District Court in the Central District of California agreed to terminate yesterday had been filed against TorrentSpy in 2006, by Viacom’s Paramount and other studios. The defendants were accused of illegally allowing users to share and download large files with the help of the popular software tool BitTorrent.

However, because of its own actions, TorrentSpy will never be able to defend itself against those accusations. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles federal judge concluded that "Defendants' conduct during discovery in this case has been obstreperous," and that "They have engaged in widespread and systematic efforts to destroy evidence and have provided false testimony under oath in an effort to hide evidence of such destruction." The Judge decided to terminate the lawsuit and to take the side of the MPAA.

But, although the court’s decision is considered a “significant victory for the major Hollywood studios,” according to John Malcolm, executive vice president and director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the Motion Picture Association of America, TorrentSpy’s attorneys called the ruling “draconian in nature and unfair” and they will appeal the decision.