Anti-Piracy Organization Tries to Shut Down Demonoid
The Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN filed a subpoena against Demonoid’s ISP (Leaseweb) in which they demand that the site will be taken offline. It seems likely that Demonoid’s current downtime is not a hardware problem, they are probably moving to another ISP.
Yesterday we reported that the downtime at demonoid was caused by a harddisk crash, but now it seems that the real reason for the downtime could be a bit more complicated.
Demonoid is probably relocating to a new “safe haven” as we speak, this also explains why it takes a few days instead of a few hours to get back online (edit: see update).
Tim Kuik, managing director of BREIN, said in response to the downtime at Demonoid (Dutch link): “They are probably playing hide and seek. We want Leaseweb to take and keep this, and other illegal sites offline.”
This the the fist time that BREIN takes on one of the bigger BitTorrent sites. Last week they won a lawsuit against Leaseweb in a similar case, this could spell trouble for Demonoid.
In this case the Amsterdam court decided that Leaseweb had to take down everlasting.nu and hand over the name and address of the owner. Additionally, Leaseweb was forced to take down everlasting.nu, in case the site returns in the near future. The same thing could now happen to Demonoid.
Nearly 94% of the .torrent files on Demonoid are used to download copyrighted material according to research by TNO. BREIN will probably use this figure in court to convince the Judge that Demonoid is mainly used to download infringing content.
Update: Demonoid now has a message on the frontpage stating that the downtime is not related to the subpoena.
Stay tuned for updates
