It seems that actually the company had said they did not have access to the IP addresses of the people on their network as it was all stored in RAM.
The judge (who seems to actually be very clued up on things from his statements) said that this was untrue because the IP addresses were temporarily stored locally on the machine in RAM.
Since the servers had an electronic copy at one stage or another it was their obligation to store this info on a permanent media system sinbce theyd been required to provide all their records. i.e. if they let the volatile info in RAM expire without saving IPs, etc to a permanent disk then they were destroying evidence. Its the data passing through RAM they requested.
Sorry to piss on any bonfires but thought it was worth clarifying
