Iceland’s Largest BitTorrent Tracker Shut Down
Written by Ernesto on November 27, 2007Torrent.is, the largest BitTorrent site in Iceland has been taken offline due to efforts from a coalition of anti-piracy organizations. Their request to seize all computer hardware associated with the site was rejected.
Things are heating up in Iceland as they witness the first BitTorrent related lawsuit. Torrent.is, the largest BitTorrent tracker in the country has received a preliminary injunction which has effectively shut down the popular tracker. The case was initiated by four anti-piracy organizations, who filed for the preliminary injunction earlier this month. The regional District Commissioners office granted their request last Monday.
Torrent.is had around 26,500 active users before the site was taken offline, this made 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.
The tracker was founded in May 2005 and used TBSource , it only recently started to generate media attention, which led to its downfall. The site is owned by Istorrent ehf., which is a company established for that purpose.
Svavar Kjarrval, the head administrator of Torrent.is is determined to put up a fight as he told TorrentFreak: “I’m going to fight this as far as I possibly can. The general public seems to be on our side.”
As a result of the takedown, Snæbjörn Steingrímsson, the executive the Icelandic equivalent of the MPAA (SMAIS), received death threats and other hatemail. SMAIS is one of the four organizations that requested the takedown of Torrent.is and has been the leading war against filesharing in Iceland and it can be safely said that Mr. Steingrímsson is one of the most hated people in the country.
The war on BitTorrent is getting tougher with (upcoming) lawsuits in Canada, The Netherlands, Hungary and of course the U.S. The question that remains unanswered, however, is whether it is illegal to host, or even link to .torrent files that point to copyrighted material. There is no reason for BitTorrent’s popularity to wane until that’s cleared up.
Previously: Most Popular DVDrips on BitTorrent (wk47)
Next: Etology Removes All BitTorrent Sites From Their Ad Network
127 Responses
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hugh = HIGH
would servers hosted in Cuba be safe?
Sad to see people associating file sharing with Ernesto Che Guevara, a true butcher and killer.
Please leave Che Guevara in hell where he deserves.
Some Humans can be so stupid sometimes, they fight over paper (which is called Money) and we fight over rocks (coins) why we do worship the wooden idols instead of god because god wants us to fileshare, why aren’t humans more intelligent then this, why do governments keep killing people over paper that you can’t take with you when you die,
I guess humans will never be wise
Just wanted to clarify two points in this article:
First off, according to the most recent numbers of the Icelandic Status Bureau, when it was closed down, Istorrent had ~8.1% of the entire population as registered users. Fully active (daily regular usage) users were 7.5% of the nation, and the rest were somewhat less active.
This is just to stop all this discussion of exactly how many percent it was :D
Also, it’s probably even safe to assume that this tracker is proportionally the biggest in the world; I’m not sure there are many other trackers that have 8% of their country’s population as regular users :D
Now, the other thing is that the reason for the network being IP locked is not to ensure greater speeds between users. The reason is that most Icelanders still have to pay-per-byte for all download on foreign traffic. At ~$40(US)/25€ per Gigabyte, it can get quite expensive quite fast, so the IP lock is simply to make absolutely sure that nobody has to pay their ISP a fortune in download fees.
As for the population being behind Istorrent, I was actually amazed at exactly how much support there is in the community, especially when you consider that most of the news agencies are owned by the very same people that are making efforts to close the sites down, which results in very single-sided, negative and downright slanderous news against Istorrent and it’s users.
One medium supposedly went to far as to describe Svavar in a derogatory way, using something that could translate to “computer nerd/geek” except with a lot more spite. I’m still waiting to see that in print, because then all hell will finally break loose :)
all watch zeigeist the movie if you haven’t
google it, it’s the first thing to come up
it’s totally free and they use LEGAL bittorrents to share their movie.
sorry ZEITGEIST movie :)
And so the war between us and them is starting to happen.
I wouldn’t want to be any anti-copyright person now. I’d stay indoors for sure and hope no-ones knows where you live.
[quote comment="224881"]Sad to see people associating file sharing with Ernesto Che Guevara, a true butcher and killer.
[/quote]
I realize i should have had a pirate pic there.
ARRR!!!
But we should have at least thumbnail adding scripts available :(
OMG. 8,5% of Iceland’s total population was a member at that tracker.
[quote comment="224744"]here is a solution that might stop the crackdown on file sharing…
The main thing the corps are going after BT sites is that the torrent file is hosted on the server. Thought the server is not responsible for the stuff ppl put on the site, why not instead get rid of the .Torrent instead use a system like morpheus or kazaa where the files don’t actually exist but the trackers will remain and a program can find all the torrents based on ur search from the various trackers and this will pop in all the information into ur BT client instead of the .torrent file. So pretty much the program will be the middle man, and as for comments, they still can be hosted on the sites just in a way that u will see it in the program instead of the site.[/quote]
I’ve been thinking about these kind of things as well. But dumping all the torrents on something Kazaa-like would make it really easy to put up spam torrents, because torrents are very small.
Instead I think it would be better to have something like magnet links. But to keep the MPAA/RIAA and the like away you do not put a link up, but only the source, without the .
There is no way they can demand that you take down such text on your site. (Freedom of speech)
For example, some time ago the master key for HD DVDs came into the public. I’ve seen people say: ” is not a MAC address!”.
And if people are lazy, somebody should just write a GreaseMonkey script to turn the text into links. =)
[quote comment="224881"]Sad to see people associating file sharing with Ernesto Che Guevara, a true butcher and killer.
Please leave Che Guevara in hell where he deserves.[/quote]
Sieg heil, Jürgen! 88 fo’ lyf, nigga!
no torrents are safe from the law
Ooops.. I mean, all torrents are safe from the law.
I’m confused. Are we allowed to use the internet now or is it illegal?
wow 26 500 users, thats like 8% of iceland :D.
[quote comment="224851"]Where is your fucking source, Mr TorrentTard?[/quote]Wouldn’t YOU like to know? Asswipe wants in on your source. So he can pass it on to his anti-peer2peer headquarters?
[quote comment="224995"]Instead I think it would be better to have something like magnet links. But to keep the MPAA/RIAA and the like away you do not put a link up, but only the source, without the .
There is no way they can demand that you take down such text on your site. (Freedom of speech)
For example, some time ago the master key for HD DVDs came into the public. I’ve seen people say: ” is not a MAC address!”.
And if people are lazy, somebody should just write a GreaseMonkey script to turn the text into links. =)[/quote]David, main developer of RandPeer http://www.randpeer.com/ will probably be getting death-threats from certain black organisations soon.
[quote comment="224657"][quote comment="224654"]Enough to sway politics.[/quote]
revolucion! :)[/quote]People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.
lots of good that did for Smáís & Co.
Few new torrent sites were set up within 2 days of the shutdown of torrent.is
Dci.is for instance.
My questions is… in Iceland, are torrent files (meta data which is not the actual intellectual property) legal like in Sweden or illegal like in the US?
If u interesting in downloading by torrent client and u looking for good invite from good web site go through this link http://tracker-invites.org/index.php?referredby=2546 and make registry and have invite and trade invite also good luck
Hopefully nobody dies though, in all seriousness the death threats only make file sharers look bad, then they will call us thieving murderers, and the murdering part will be true.
Just need leet haxxor skillz thats all.
[quote comment="224674"]This is definately interesting considering the isolation of Iceland. I think they will fight and hold their own, them scandanavian countries have that tendancy.[/quote]
You bet we do :)
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