Iceland’s Largest BitTorrent Tracker Faces Permanent Shutdown
Written by Ernesto on March 16, 2008Torrent.is went to court this week and the site now faces a permanent shutdown and the possibility that they will have to compensate copyright owners. Since nearly 10% of Iceland’s population were members, Torrent.is was by far the most popular BitTorrent tracker in the country.
During 
November last year, Torrent.is received a preliminary injunction, which led to the shutdown of the site and a 50% drop in Internet traffic in Iceland.
The public hearing of the case was held this week, and the plaintiffs asked for a permanent shutdown of the BitTorrent tracker and compensation for damages.
Snæbjörn Steingrímsson, the executive of the Icelandic equivalent of the MPAA (SMAIS) led the investigation, and wants to see his clients compensated for the losses they claim to have suffered because of the tracker.
Steingrímsson said he couldn’t state the exact damages but said they were a few hundred million ISK. Interestingly, Steingrímsson was a member of the BitTorrent site himself, and shared copyrighted material on the tracker as part of his investigation.
Before the tracker was taken offline, Torrent.is had around 26,500 active users, making it by far the largest and most famous private BitTorrent tracker in Iceland. The tracker only allowed Icelandic IPs to connect to their tracker to ensure fast connectivity between peers.
Svavar Kjarrval, the head administrator of Torrent.is is convinced that he has a strong case, as he told TorrentFreak: “The plaintiffs are making an outrageous claim. They argue that website and domain owners should always be responsible for copyright violations of third parties. The case could set a dangerous precedent if the court agrees with their claims.”
It looks like Iceland is getting tougher with file-sharers. Two weeks ago, Reykjavík District Court convicted nine individuals for distributing copyrighted material via Direct Connect. Direct Connect was widely used in Iceland, but nowadays more and more users prefer BitTorrent. The individuals convicted in the Direct Connect case will most likely appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.
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60 Responses
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To put in to perspective,Iceland is 300.000 people
If 10% of the population do something it’s fair to assume that an even larger part think it acceptable. So it might be time to change the laws.
Damn I was hoping to get Bjork’s whole back cataloge with that tracker and Island’s favorite TV series now in its 15th season “Let’s watch Ice melt” in HD.
It IS time to change the law!
This is stupid, they can’t say they loose money with filesharing, because there are lots of other things that may make people buy less DVDs…
And i bet that if iceland torrent went off, their dvd sells won’t grow!
Pirate Björk CDs NOW!=]
[quote comment="313092"]It IS time to change the law!
This is stupid, they can’t say they loose money with filesharing, because there are lots of other things that may make people buy less DVDs…
And i bet that if iceland torrent went off, their dvd sells won’t grow![/quote]
Usually you see a backlash in this situation, those file sharers aren’t about to start buying DVD’s, they will get it no matter what, if anything P2P will go up and DVD sales will go down because of this, you watch.
When torrent.is got shutdown, I think 4 other local torrent sites were opened.
1 month after torrent.is got shutdown, thevikingbay.org (Icelandic exclusive) torrent website was opened, and today , about 3 months later, has more than 24.000 users.
I think they made a huge mistake in suing him, because atleast torrent.is honored takedown claims, and removed torrents if the copyright owners asked them to, while TheVikingBay.org basicly tells them to fuck off and promotes the material for download that is asked to be taken down.
Before the shutdown of the only BitTorrent site in Iceland. There existed ONE BitTorrent tracker in the country.
Currently there are more than FIVE operating BitTorrent trackers in Iceland.
It only goes to show that you can not try to stop progress from happening. Only pray with SMÁÍS (MPAA) for it to go slower.
urr purR!
The guys who are suing are the same guys that already had empty CD’s and DVD’s taxed and now they want to tax external hard drives too.
Ísland!
This has got to stop. New systems have to be developed in place of file sharing methods, because this long cycle of people trying to shut sites down for sharing is wrong. Freedom of information, knowledge and human growth is a must. restriction or the ‘filtering’ of selected controlled media to people by others is not what we want, because people want more choice…..if I have a friend and they don’t have a certain song or vice versa, without a doubt if i or they requested for it it should be given freely, or in exchange for a song the other doesn’t have. It’s called SHARING. what the media companies are saying is that it is ILLEGAL to share, that’s a bit wrong in itself. they need to change their systems, because the people will for them……
The strange thing is that these organizations (SMÁÍS, STEF, SAMTÓNN and more) actualy dont have written permission to represent most
artists, writers, programmers etc from them.
These organizataions had argued in that hearing that TermsOfService of torrent.is were meaningless. So the defense countered with saying, if so then the TOSes of ISPs and EULAs of software would also be meaningless. And imo copyright licenses would then also be meaningless rendering most artists, writers, etc, unable to release or publish their works.
But what is stranger is that the goverment looks away from the balant
breaking of compition laws by these content distributers. (Reagion code locking, digital restriction management that doesnt expire, etc)
It has been rumors thats claim that Snæbjörn Steingrímsson used torrent.is himself before the site were shutdown bit hypocrisy if you ask me.
[quote comment="312867"]“Island” is the icelandic name for Iceland.[/quote]
Nah, it’s Ísland
Torrent.is had been going for a good while and might have been left alone if they’d not made a crucial mistake. There was a ratio system, so unless you would seed for a while you wouldn’t get access to torrents until they’d been up for a few hours (at which point everyone would have them, so seeding was nearly pointless, so you it was hard to get back in good standing, but that’s another matter.)
However, the people behind torrent.is started taking money to improve people’s ratios. At that point it becomes a commercial enterprise and the law views it completely differently. That, at least, is the theory.
Now we’ll just have to see how it all goes. Of course, several other Icelandic-only trackers sprang up immediately when torrent.is was taken off-line, not that I’d, um, know anything about that.
What really makes me laugh though is the “10% of Icealands population were signed up” You do understand that its capital Reyjavik is about the size of a small English town meaning that 10% of the population was roughly <30,000 people. Funny statistic thats all.
P.s. Self-preclaimed geek!
[quote comment="313208"]
Nah, it’s Ísland
[/quote]
Sorry, I knew that, but I don’t have the “Í” character (which I now copy and pasted) on my keyboard. :-)
I’ll share anyway. If necessary, I’ll bring a bag of shared CDs and DVDs next time I fly there and give them away.
[quote comment="313195"]…
But what is stranger is that the goverment looks away from the balant
breaking of compition laws by these content distributers. (Reagion code locking, digital restriction management that doesnt expire, etc)[/quote]
Governments all over the planet get a lot of pressure from the WTO. Through official channels of course. It’s called globalization. Even brave and truthful politicians cannot risk trade disadvantages or worse for their people. So, what choice do they have?
[quote comment="312631"]Do you know how small Island is? They have a population of 312 851 people.
[/quote]
So then they can sue all P2P-users and put in to the jail… no problem, only little change from Iceland to Jailland. Duh, 8=
Ireland.
(First, to all those who promote “who cares?” attitude: STFU and GTFO, please. You can also shoot yourself in the head in order to stop polluting this world with your presence.)
Dear Icelanders, this is my message for you: sharing is caring. Know that we, the P2P community, do care for you. You’re our fellows, our friends, our brothers in arms. Your loss is our loss, your pain is our pain.
Dark times are upon us. The enemy is cunning, merciless and powerful. It wants to take our freedom and it’ll stop for nothing. Corporations care only about money. They have no common sense, no moral values, no inhibitions. Arguing with them is useless. We must fight.
Don’t lose hope, friends, don’t surrender. It’s hundreds of millions of us around the world, joined by our righteous cause. We must show them that we have no fear. Share more every day! Don’t vote for venal politicians! Boycott unscrupulous ISPs! Support those who are illegally accused or wrongly judged!
Let them hear our voice: we will fight and will win!
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