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BitTorrent Tracker Loses Lengthy Legal Battle

More than two years have passed since a coalition of anti-piracy organizations forced Torrent.is, the largest BitTorrent site in Iceland, to go offline. In the years that followed, the BitTorrent tracker won in court more than once, but at the end of the road there was a negative verdict for the site’s owner.

istorrentFounded in May 2005, Torrent.is was home to around 26,500 active users before the site was forced to go offline. The site only allowed Icelandic IPs to connect to the tracker and it was by far the largest and most famous private BitTorrent tracker in Iceland.

The local anti-piracy lobby had also started to take notice of the BitTorrent tracker’s growing popularity and decided to take legal action. During November 2007, Svavar Kjarrval, the owner of the tracker, received a preliminary injunction which left him no other choice than to shut down the site.

While the majority of BitTorrent tracker owners would have given up when confronted with legal action, Svavar decided to put up a fight. “I’m going to fight this as far as I possibly can. The general public seems to be on our side,” he told TorrentFreak at the time, and he kept his word.

What followed was a lengthy legal battle that was fought in two rounds. In the first round Torrent.is came out as the winner at both the District Court and the Supreme Court. However, the local equivalent of the RIAA (STEF) simply started a new case based on new claims, so the whole circus started from scratch.

STEF claimed that Torrent.is was violating copyright law and the case went before the District Court again. The Icelandic tracker again came out victorious, but the legal bullying didn’t stop there and STEF took the case to the Supreme Court hoping for a win.

Today the Supreme Court delivered its verdict, announcing Torrent.is had been found guilty. The owner of the site was ordered to pay legal fees of $3,350 and refrain from opening the site to the public.

Svavar informed TorrentFreak that this negative outcome marks the end of a seemingly endless legal battle. Although he is disappointed in the verdict, Svavar said that he simply cannot afford to appeal the case due to a lack of money.

It is expected that the outcome of this case will be used to bolster European anti-piracy outfits to pursue legal action against other BitTorrent trackers. In Iceland, Svavar thinks it will mean that file-sharers will increasingly go underground, if it has any effect at all.

“The battle might be lost but the file-sharing war has not ended,” Svavar concluded.

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  • Hannah

    WTF is with the court systems in so many places? Don’t like the result? Appeal. Then appeal again. And again and again, until you get the desired result. Congrats, you win! Meanwhile the little guy who can’t afford the dozens of trials and appeals is screwed.

  • http://www.eZee.se www.eZee.se

    @1, Its the scumbag way.
    They can match a million to our every dollar… but dont forget we match a million filesharers to each of the anti piracy goons.

    …

    And with this win, Iceland is free from piracy…. not.

  • anonymouse

    “the outcome of this case will be used to bolster European anti-piracy outfits to pursue legal action against other BitTorrent trackers”. what a shame the outcome of the cases that have been lost by the various copywrite groups aren’t used in the same way as well. because of the verdicts handed down, (ON 3 DIFFERENT OCCASIONS, NO LESS!!) being different to what was wanted by the local RIAA, they kept lodging appeals until they got the verdict they did want. money talking again, like was mentioned in a post yesterday. coupled with the usual lack of knowledge on the part of the judges of the case, and a few grand being chucked in certain directions, the outcome was inevitable. just took a bit longer than they expected, that’s all.

  • Vitamin-N

    It is a odd kind of battle we have going on isn’t it?

    Anyways ya to bad he lost but at least it seemed like punishment was not severe like you hear about most of the time now a days with piracy.

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  • Anonymous

    fuck we should have and appeal limit per year in a single case.

  • Anonymous

    “It is expected that the outcome of this case will be used to bolster European anti-piracy outfits to pursue legal action against other BitTorrent trackers.”

    This outcome is a shame and this parasite of Svavar should be ashame of himself for being an antisocial.

    However it will not help the corporate parasite even a bit! On the contrary, It help us spread the boycott further and recruit more pirate party members.

    As far as trackers are concerned do this moron understand that BT no longer use trackers?

  • SirReal

    I agree with #1, are they really allowed to be so relentless in their stupidity?

  • .

    one by one they will fail and fall, it will not be allowed to continue
    Hell in a hand-cart
    You have been warned

  • Lock stock $$$

    The Pirate Bay will fall…eventually

    And then, all he trackers Magnet Links DHT will fail LOLz

  • Georgia

    Does Bjork fileshare? That is all I want to know.

  • Anti troll

    About #6:

    Remember fellow file sharers > Don’t feed the Trolls ! That’s what they want.

  • Mark

    @1

    Say hello to Capitalism at its best, goes to show if corporations want something they can force the hand of anyone to get it. Sad really.

  • bone bone

    and meanwhile it cost thousands of dollars to the RIAA equivelent :) And since svavar won a few cases he got his money back to pay his lawyers and stuff…

    But its about to change this capitalist world into something more evolved…

  • sharing

    I wonder when personal replicators are created, allowing for instant replication of food, if asking the replicator to make Heinz condiments will replicate an airborne pair of handcuffs which seek out your wrists and clamp down, propelling you to your nearest police station via intrusive brainwave manipulation?

  • iBone

    Just like TPB crew said, trackers needs to be replaced by DHT. We need to replace all the weak points in the BT protocol so it’s truly decentralized.

  • Walrus

    @12

    http://torrindex.com/

    You mean like that?

  • Anonymous

    pathetic.. just appeal until u get what u want.. if you hav money ofc :s

  • Unauthorized Content Consumer

    Yep. This will stop piracy forever.

    *face palm*

    Okay now. Back to my downloading. xD

  • Ninja

    My utmost respect for Svavar. As he said, a battle might have been lost due to the lack of money to continue but the war has been decided the moment ordinary people like us didn’t accept their ways.

    I hope they got badly hurt in their pockets with this.

    Again, respect. Steel balls, rock solid character and willpower.

  • rd dis

    I will continue to fileshare. This means upload and download. Mafiaa go to hell (where you belong).

  • Reasoned Mind

    Boycott the industry and fileshare only material that is not copyrighted.

    Perfectly fair, and they deserve no payments on this.

    Fileshare copyrighted material that the industries have investment in? And deserve a financial return on investment?

    Take your chances with penalties and punishments for breaking the law.

    Perfectly fair, and you deserve no excuses on this.

    You know the laws. Obey them, legally change them or be fucked. Personally I think it’s quite fair that way. I love it when Jammie and Joel got caught and got fucked.
    lol

  • anonymous

    row row fight the power!

  • dune

    harkonnen unit destroyed

  • Bjork

    @8 yes.

  • prodigydancer

    Does Iceland even still exist? Last time I heard it was a bankrupt country of the 3-rd world.

  • Yatti420

    It’s sad that after so many victories the industry finally wins one.. If he appealed I bet he would win..

  • Men move boundry stones; they pastrure flocks they have stolen.

    That seems like the most fair legal settlement fee of $3,500.

    I’m happy for the Judge and people of Iceland.

    Anything more would have just ruined a persons life, needlessly. He’s made so many people happy with access to the media they loved.

  • Sceptre

    More crap… blah blah legal battle blah blah copyright blah fing blah

    No money gained.. no harm done… it’s getting to point to where more than just words are needed.

    No shit needed on money is lost because you downloaded bs. I wouldn’t have paid for it anyway. I got bills to pay and my stomach to feed. Unlike everyone involved in some kind of copyrighted work. They already have enough money in their coffers. Get out and get a real job and quit coasting thru life.

  • loveforsatin

    just an idear what if the piratbay charged everyone say 1 pound $ a year vea paypal for membership to help with legal costs in thery with a good legal team on retainer they could pospone the legal trials indefanatley at the worst if not win there case then thay would be in with a fighting cance and ass rape these fags paramount trystar ect

  • loveforsatin

    pessonaly i think i have earned the right to get free films apart from the cost for dvdr+ to burn them lol i mean i used to buy vhs films when they cotsed 15 to 20 pund each for a good 10 years and i ant rich far from it i sacraficed new trainers sneekers ect for buying the lates film then they replace vhs with dvd making my investment of thousands of ponds in films worth shit and bring out a souposed better quality product dvd lol more like a good excuse to fuck the comsumer one scratch and you have to buy it again

  • M-RES

    @21 Obvious troll is obvious

    The frightening thing is the framing of the discussion by the media leeches like the MAFIAA.
    They’re slowly presenting file-sharing as a whole as something illegal and having torrent trackers closed down, thus blocking the distribution of all indie content producers.

    This is perhaps their biggest aim. It’s been shown many times that file-sharing actually increases their sales, so why hurt their customers? Economically it makes no sense taken on it’s own. But if you factor in the ‘competition’ element of file-sharing where indie artists are proving the major labels irrelevant, it makes PERFECT sense why the MAFIAA are trying to shut them down.

    The mainstream media aren’t picking this up either, or are simply ignoring it knowing that it’s part of their own industry being affected, so users of Open Source software and Creative Commons licensed media are being denied access to their choice of applications and media.

    This seems like blatant actionable monopolistic/cartel activity by the media giants using their vast financial muscle to unfairly and illegally skew the marketplace to the detriment of their competition and consumers in general.

    The MAFIAA hate YOU, the consumer. They want your money, they don’t want you to download free music – even indie artists GIVING you their music for free. They can’t compete with that business model, so they want to stifle that kind of grassroots creativity and ultimately kill art, film and music.

    Join your local Pirate Party – spread the word amongst people you know, because this will affect EVERYBODY!

  • rd dis

    Iceland aims to become an offshore haven for journalists & whistleblowers (Harvard) http://bit.ly/d7HPZp

    On Tuesday, the Icelandic parliament is expected to introduce a measure aimed at making the country an international center for investigative journalism publishing, by passing the strongest combination of source protection, freedom of speech, and libel-tourism prevention laws in the world.

    Haha fu mafiaa Reason Mind eat this too. :-)

  • MissedMemories

    Well. Aside from the “Reasoned Mind” up there, and “M-RES” above me, I can’t see any constructive commentaries, and the most probably thing is that mine won’t be.

    But! if we shared only free software, and used only free software, I wonder how many looses would those companies have because of the next two reasons:

    1. They wouldn’t sell that much.
    2. They wouldn’t have anyone to sue.

    So it makes sense… I’m trying to get my shit out of windows and get a Linux distribution working in my pc, however… that’s a Long shitty process we have sir.

    Back to topic. We should do what Reasoned Mind said for once, but adding this: Only FileShare Free Software AND only use Free Software. It really makes sense. We would be free, have more money, and not worry about the Biggest companies.

    But this would cause we lose the biggest launch of the “Best Game Ever” and be some retards, wouldn’t it? So I guess I’ll keep downloading on uT2.0

  • fancy

    garbage in garbage out

  • Anonymous

    Begun the File-Sharing Wars have. /Yoda Voice.

  • The Truth Will Set You Free

    1/4

    Why are the media corporations so afraid of us, and why are they trying so very hard to win against us? It’s simple. Greed.

    HISTORY OF CONTROL
    Radio has been around since the 1890’s. It quickly became commercialized where corporations could promote and sell music. They first sold vinyl records and eventually started to sell 8-track tapes and cassettes.

    They sold products that weren’t meant to last forever. Vinyl records were prone to scratches causing them to skip permanently making them unusable. 8-tracks and cassettes were prone to slowly being worn, stretched, torn losing their sound quality becoming distorted and eventually snapping. Naturally when something you bought became useless you had no choice but to buy a brand new one and the cycle repeated. This meant a steady and garanteed stream of income for the corporations.

    There was no way to “save” a song on the radio for yourself. If you liked what you heard you had no choice but to buy their products. This was a wonderful time for the corporations and it made them very rich, and music artists became very wealthy as well. New artists and groups fueled the industry and kept everything going.

    ANALOG RECORDING TECHNOLOGY
    Then along came the cassette audio recorder and video recorders for home use in the 1960’s. Oh boy. The media corporations fought tooth and nail to stop manufacturers from making these devices. They predicted doom and gloom and that it would be the end of them. It never happened.

    Eventually the music companies created CD’s and the movie companies sold VHS/Beta movies in the 80’s. All the media corporations rejoiced that they were making lots of money from this new technology.

    COMPUTERS AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
    Throughout the 80’s home computers were becoming more affordable and powerful.

    It was not until the 90’s that home computers were becoming more popular spawning a generation of computer geniuses that began to figure out how to “rip” the music off of CD’s and store them on hard drives and to save space by created compression algorithms. 1 minute of CD audio is around 10 megabytes but a compressed file could shrink down to 1 megabyte. File sharing was nearly impossible.

  • The Truth Will Set You Free

    2/4

    THE INTERNET
    Throughout the 90’s the internet was slow compared to todays standards. No one really cared enough to bother transferring even “tiny” compressed music files through the internet on the horribly slow connections, and there weren’t really any convenient software programs that made it possible to do such a thing anyways.

    This changed very quickly. IRC, FTP, Usenet and a host of programs made it possible for the first time to share files through the internet albeit at a slow snails pace (sometimes taking days to transfer a 3 minute song). The internet became faster, software became more sophisticated and things were still underground with perhaps only a few thousand people sharing media with one another. Still, most computer/internet users never really cared because they were blissfully ignorant and happy with their CD’s and cassettes.

    RIAA CAUSES FILESHARING TO GO MAINSTREAM
    The RIAA started taking notice. They wanted to stop the few thousand people from sharing their music. They start filing lawsuits against the file sharing groups and software makers such as Napster. This made big internet news around the world. This is the point when the RIAA opened Pandoras Box.

    Overnight, this sent curiosity seekers to find out what all the fuss was about, and new file sharing software makers spawned out of nowhere. KaZaa, WinMX, ShareAza to name a few. Suddenly millions of people were sharing files.

    The RIAA created publicity with their lawsuits causing filesharing to go mainstream.

    CD BURNERS
    CD burners had been around throughout the 90’s but they were extremely expensive beyond the reach of the average user. They became more affordable in the early 90’s and everyone started burning their own music CD’s.

  • The Truth Will Set You Free

    3/4

    BROADBAND INTERNET
    Internet Service Providers started offering high speed DSL and cable services in the late 90’s making it possible to share a music file in seconds. The ISP’s were appearing in more and more homes around the world.

    MPAA GOES ON ATTACK
    Just as with the first compressed audio file, before DSL/cable internet it just wasn’t feasible to dare transfer a movie through the internet. This changed when DSL/cable internet appeared on the scene. Compressing a 4.7 gigabyte movie down to 700 megabytes become possible, thus making it possible to share a near DVD quality movie in less than an hour.

    LEVIES
    The corporations cry loss of income for artists due to new digital medias so they successfully convince lawmakers to create new “taxes” on portable media sold by retailers. There is no evidence that artists have ever received a penny of this money.

    BITTORENT
    Thanks to the ability of sharing small bits of files from hundreds, thousand or millions of file sharers around the world, it has been extremely efficient and fast to share a song or movie. This has become the standard for the sharing of large files for the worlds internet users. There are already technologies in existence today that allows even more efficient file sharing and going beyond Bittorent that includes encryption and virtual tunneling of data making file sharing completely untrackable, untracable; completely invisible.

    THE IPOD
    Portable music players had been around for decades, but nothing changed the landscape more than Apple’s iPod. Ironically, the iPod just happened to come around at just the right time that music piracy was starting to become popular. Was this just a mere coincidence or was Apple just taking a gamble on a new product? Who knows. ;) But Apple has earned billions in iPod sales, and since Apple doesn’t allow their batteries or memory to be upgraded this sounds suspiciously like planned-obsolescence. Then of course there is iTunes and Apps Store which are also earning billions in profits.

  • The Truth Will Set You Free

    4/4

    NO GOING BACK
    Thanks to digital technology, compression, digital data transfer and the genius of computer programmers writing file transfer software code there is no going back. Thanks to the first RIAA lawsuits that sent curiosity seekers to try file sharing on their own, file sharers now number in the millions. I would suspect that it is probably nearing 1 billion worldwide.

    LOSS OF CONTROL = LOSS OF PROFITS
    The corporations can no longer control their products. Many record stores have already gone out of business. The media corporations can not control customers, they can not control their profits by selling planned-obsolescence products forcing customers to buy the same product over and over again guaranteeing an income stream. No one can foresee 0′s and 1′s becoming obsolete.

    RIAA/MPAA PUBLICITY AND LEGAL MACHINE
    As the corporations begin to realize that they’ve lost control, they learn the best legal maneuvers to change the laws around the world. Hiring lawyers that know how to speak to lawmakers (most of whom are lawyers themselves) they have managed to create new laws and extend copyrights to serve corporate interests.

    The corporations manipulate the news medias’ to push their own agendas. They send out messages that piracy is evil, pirates are evil, that artists are suffering, etc.

    Since this didn’t appear to be working they opted to change laws so that it would make it possible for them to force ISP’s to hand over customer information so they could be sued, and to make examples out of people and scare everyone else in to submission. Along the way they sued children, single parent families, low income families, low income pensioners, widows/widowers, people that didn’t know what a computer or internet was, and even dead people. Innocent users were getting sued and some of them were fearful enough that they inadvertently admitted guilt by paying fines. This was a new way for lawyers and executives to guarantee their income stream, and there has been no proof that the artists that they were claiming to defend have ever seen a penny from these lawsuits.I could go on forever about this but everyone pretty much knows what else they’ve been up to.

  • The Truth Will Set You Free

    5/6

    THE REAL REASON WHY THE CORPORATIONS ARE AFRAID
    Money.

    The media corporations receive a lot of money from investors/stockholders. Just like any other corporations that relies on stockholders to keep their business alive, they need to keep their stockholders happy.

    The heads of these corporations have an important job of generating income to make sure that the stockholders are happy and keep their money invested in the business.

    The way things are going, it should be very obvious that stockholders are very unhappy (would you?) but the heads of the corporations are putting on a smiling face, are spending millions on the legal/political/publicity machine to keep their business model and revenue going. Just like any other business, they’re forced to cut back on staff to retain
    the same income stream.

    The corporations have private meetings with lawmakers to pass laws secretly so they don’t alarm their stockholders and consumers. They have these meetings with lawmakers in private warning them that if stockholders panic and start pulling their money out of the companies, this will lead to a collapse of these companies causing a chain reaction to the worlds economy.

    DRM
    The truth is the corporations have run out of options and they don’t know what to do. They’ve tried to create new business models that are more in line with today’s technology but they wanted to control their media with something called Digital Rights Management (DRM). Consumers of today aren’t as easy to control as they were decades ago, and they no longer want to be controlled. DRM has failed.

    EVENTUAL COLLAPSE AND FINAL TRUTH
    The collapse of the music and movie industry is inevitable. The fears of a domino effect causing damage to the world economy is overplayed. You see, the corporations and privileged music artists are in total hoarding trillions of dollars in wealth. When the few privileged hoard their wealth this means less money that is circulating in our economy.

  • The Truth Will Set You Free

    6/6
    The trillions that are being hoarded would better serve millions of artists that would sustain and feed them, instead of only serving the privileged few. This in turn would enrich our economy and culture, evolve our culture much more quickly and provide the birth of new artists. These artists would survive on their own making a living, performing for their fans and earning income directly from those that are willing to pay for their product in this new digital world.

    Yes. Consumers ARE willing to support artists directly but it is difficult to do so at this point in time.

    This would mean the end of executives and mediocre artists hoarding wealth for themselves.
    Copyright exists only to make the privileged few wealthy, to stifle technological innovation, stifling creativity, stifling potential artists, and most importantly it is stifling the entire human race.

  • STEF

    I am happy to report that, with this win, we have freed Iceland from all kind of pirates.

    This kind of move will help the world move on forward!

    And it will allow us to earn another thousand trillion dollars per month.

    All your base are belong to us.

  • djnforce9

    Sounds like the anti-piracy outfit is more interested in “harassment” in order to force the site out of existence for good. Therefore, they keep up the legal pressure as long as possible.

    @STEF: Yup. After all, they only needed to shut down ONE torrent site and all the pirates could just magically disappeared :p

  • Anonymous

    @The Truth Will Set You Free

    Amen Brother

  • Jim

    I think that just shutting the site down and opening a new one is a better strategy.

    When you keep shifting around, your harder to pin down.

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  • Raisin Brain

    this is good news. intellectual property must be protected.

  • FyreFox

    After the past 10 years, we are still under the scruinty of a disorganzied “justice” system. Why are they fightng an unstopable force? it is like trying to stop a tidal wave. chances are its going to happen regradless the amount of restiance you put up.

  • Capt Hook

    For every one that falls, ten take its place. Good luck with that.

  • Trelew

    This is how corporations win court cases. They drag it out as long as possible until their victim is broke because of legal costs. Not because they are right but because they can control the courts with high powered lawyers, corporate lobbyists who will bribe anyone, anything but the truth!

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  • annoyance

    and another one bites the dust.

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  • Freyrn

    First of all you can not appeal a verdict from the Icelandic Supreme Court it is FINAL. And the accusers ultimately failed since they got no compensation and only succeeded in shutting the site down and that Svavar paid the legal fees ( wich are btw: substantial!

    So the outcome is a tie so to speak.

    Anyways Kudos to Svavar for standing up. But it seems that as long as trackers do not include Icelandic copyrighted material. They are left “alone” ……..

    Regards: Freyr Njardvik, Iceland

    PS: The reference to Iceland having become a 3rd world country is grossly exagerated. Things are surprisingly normal here….

    FN

  • BTGuard - BitTorrent Anonymously

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