RAM Ruling Portends a New E-Discovery Brawl

A federal magistrate's order that stops a Web site from routinely tossing relevant data could, if replicated, carry broad e-discovery implications.

Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Chooljian's May 29 order requires TorrentSpy to turn over customer data only ephemerally kept in its computers' random access memory, or RAM. It could result in floods of similar requests in other civil cases, according to Ira Rothken, the Novato, Calif.-based attorney for the TorrentSpy site.

The Los Angeles magistrate's order also has privacy watchdogs concerned.

This is the first case Rothken said he could find where a court considered transient RAM data as something discoverable, he said. Any company currently being sued -- even before any liability has been found -- could end up having to collect and turn over RAM data at great cost, Rothken said.

"Lawyers will be flinging around preservation letters, coming up with all kinds of creative ways to tell the other to preserve RAM," he said. "That would cause huge economic implications. If it's not changed, it can create e-discovery chaos."

Chooljian's order is stayed pending TorrentSpy's appeal.

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Complying with an order like this would require freezing all running processes and doing a memory dump.

That would shut down a business or website until the procedure could be done properly.

And everything goes "poof" when you turn off the power button. I think a lot of people would consider that before allowing an invasive search like that.

Man, it keeps getting crazier out there every day. They need to hit Rove up with this.