Leaseweb Forced To Shut Down More BitTorrent Sites
Written by Ernesto on November 16, 2007The Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has forced LeaseWeb to take down several BitTorrent sites. Although the ISP is determined to fight for its customers in court, for now, it has no other option than to shut down BitTorrent sites when they’re ordered to.
BREIN uses the decision from a case from earlier this year to put pressure on LeaseWeb. In this case, the Amsterdam court ruled that Leaseweb had to take the BitTorrent tracker everlasting.nu offline and hand over the name and address of the owner. Additionally, Leaseweb was ordered to take down everlasting.nu, in case the site returns in the near future.
It looks like LeaseWeb, once the safe haven of many BitTorrent sites, is now seriously under threat. BREIN already used the decision in the everlasting.nu case to take Demonoid down and are now planning to do the same with other BitTorrent sites hosted at LeaseWeb. TorrentFreak got its hands on an email from LeaseWeb, in which they urge one of their customers to take their website offline.
LeaseWeb writes in the email: “In a recent case at the Amsterdam District Court, LeaseWeb was ordered to take down such sites. Although LeaseWeb has filed an appeal and will keep fighting for its client’s rights up to the highest court, LeaseWeb regrettable has no choice but to obey the court order and take down sites that list (bittorrent/edonkey) files.”
This is an alarming statement since there are lots of BitTorrent sites hosted at LeaseWeb. For now only SumoTorrent has confirmed that the .torrent files and the tracker will move to an ISP in Canada, but according to the email from LeaseWeb it is likely that more sites will follow.
Interestingly, the BitTorrent sites are allowed to keep their servers at LeaseWeb as long as they move the .torrent files and the trackers to another host. This means that the frontend of some sites might stay at LeaseWeb and that a link to a file that links to copyrighted content is fine.
To give an indication of the magnitude of the issue, here’s a selection of some of the bigger BitTorrent sites hosted at LeaseWeb and there are many more.
btjunkie.org, seedpeer.com, torrentleech.org, mybittorrent.com, btmon.com, sumotorrent.com, what.cd, waffles.fm, hdbits.org, bitenova.nl, torrentportal.com, monova.org and dozens of smaller BitTorrent sites.
Not all these websites received an email from LeaseWeb (yet). It seems that BREIN plans to focus on the sites that run a BitTorrent tracker, similar to Demonoid and Everlasting.nu, first.
It’s a tough spot for LeaseWeb to be in as a significant part of their income comes from these BitTorrent sites. However, they have to obey the court order, and are pretty serious about it as they write: “We hereby kindly request you to take down the website mentioned below within 24hours. Failure to do so will result in a direct ending of the contract and services provided by LeaseWeb.”
We asked LeaseWeb for a comment and they forwarded a copy of their legal statement regarding sites listing BitTorrent files in which they explain that there is no other option than to take down BitTorrent sites if they are asked to. However, they also state: “LeaseWeb has filed an appeal and will keep fighting for its client’s privacy and right of freedom of expression up to the highest court.”
Stay tuned for updates!
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111 Responses
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this is looking poorly for p2p
Ohh REALLY? :P
Interesting. I’m not sure that I understand why BitTorrent trackers get away legally with what they do (unless they are big public ones that are used for lots of lawful content, like The Pirate Bay). Nobody uploads or downloads copyrighted content from the site itself, but the tracker coordinates such copying. That makes it exactly the same as what the original Napster did, as far as I can tell, so I would think they would be on the same legal grounds as Napster. In the U.S. at least, that was “contributory copyright infringement.”
In a security sense, the P2P community took a step backwards moving to torrents. We had decentralized networks, but went to BitTorrent, which is completely centralized. With that centralization came big improvements in efficiency, reliability, and ease of finding content. Now it seems like we need a more decentralized solution that still retains those advantages as much as possible.
There do exist almost completely anonymous filesharing networks, such as MUTE (http://mute-net.sf.net/), but again, efficiency and available content do suffer, so not a lot of people are using them. Other options might include hosting BitTorrent trackers over I2P (http://www.i2p.net/), so that nobody can track who is running them. This still is a sacrifice of some convenience and ease of use, so might turn many filesharers off.
I caution people against believing that Sweden is the magic bullet. “Move to Sweden” gets trotted out more than ever as the answer to all your tracker legality woes. Copyright laws can change, and Sweden could become more hostile towards BitTorrent. Beyond that, it’s simply a bad idea to move all trackers to one place. Industry groups are desperate enough to resort to extra-legal means (http://thepiratebay.org/blog/86) when the law is not on their side.
Not good…
You’re joking, right? Seems like last month has been victory after victory for the anti-piracy corporations.
Fuckin bullshit mother fuckers
Waffles.fm has already secured a Swedish server. The move is coming, soon, much sooner than you may expect, and will be entirely seamless.
[quote comment="215229"]Waffles.fm has already secured a Swedish server. The move is coming, soon, much sooner than you may expect, and will be entirely seamless.[/quote]
Wasn’t Oink based in Sweden? :X
[quote comment="215237"][quote comment="215229"]Waffles.fm has already secured a Swedish server. The move is coming, soon, much sooner than you may expect, and will be entirely seamless.[/quote]
Wasn’t Oink based in Sweden? :X[/quote]
if I remember correctly, OinK was in the UK and the Netherlands, but I’m not sure
Brein suck ass in the biggest way, not content with Demonoid they’re now going after everyone else!
No, OiNK was hosted by NForce in The Netherlands.
Waffles and What.cd will be moving to Sweden AFAIK.
Oink was hosted in the Netherlands.
OiNK was at Leaseweb, BTW. They were hosted by NForce who in turn rent server space from LeaseWeb.
ohhhh snaappp
[quote comment="215226"]You’re joking, right? Seems like last month has been victory after victory for the anti-piracy corporations.[/quote]
I’m guessing their cheques for the bribes cleared this month
Is it necessary to post the names of sites yet not affected by this action
within this story ?
As Oink said these people are incredibly inept ,so why provide them with fuel for the fire ?
Make them find us one by one ,
on there own time.
WoW,, thanks a lot Ernesto for handing over a list of torrent sites that are hosted by Leaseweb. WTF is this? Are you working with Brein or something? Anyway,,, let me tell you what someone inside Brein told Bogaa today:
Mininova will be sued by Brein in the next few weeks or months, mainly because they run the site as a corporate entity (mininova bv). I guess none of us are safe! BTW Ernesto your not helping anyone, take down that list and keep this shit private!
Peoples, clam down, they take 2 down
10 takes its PLACE! not even
thinking about it…..please!!
What The Fuck is wrong with you man, take down that list you stupid RIAA/MPAA dicksucking motherfucker
What happens if you cut off all of the hydra’s heads at once?
It’s news you retards, SO WE KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON behind the scenes. STFU now
it might be news but its still stupidity to post a link of all of us hosted on leaseweb
it might be news, but its still stupidity to post a list over all of us hosted on leaseweb
god, if i werent such a pussy i’d go set the brein headquarters on fire or something. motherfuckers.
oh my god.
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