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.