More BitTorrent Sites Going Down
BREIN did it again. The Dutch anti-piracy organization forced TorrentIt and NLexperience to go offline. Although BREIN has no legal power, threatening with lawsuits and high fines seems to be an effective strategy to take the smaller BitTorrent sites down.
TorrentIt (27.000 users) and NLexperience (10.000 users) both experienced BREIN’s pressure for the second time. Last year both sites went offline for a short period of time after being targeted for the first time. Both decided to relocate their servers, and continued serving torrents on a foreign server. TorrentIt moved their servers to Malaysia while NLexperience found a hideout in Russia.
However, BREIN identified NLexperience‘s domain-holder and visited him at his home address, a technique often used by BREIN to put pressure on their victims. NLexperience went offline, but the site operator said to its users that he was determined to come back. When BREIN heard about these plans, it immediately sued the domain-holder, who eventually felt he had to comply.
Around the same time BREIN visited the 20 year old operator of TorrentIt, formerly known as 123torrents. After the first time BREIN went after TorrentIt, the site owner tried to sell the site for $30.000. BREIN in the meanwhile was preparing to strike again.
‘The admin had been active from The Netherlands earlier, and seemed to be in the assumption we would lose track if he would move the site to a foreign country’, says BREIN CEO Tim Kuik. ‘This was a misconception. We knew he hadn’t sold the site because there was too much resistance from the community to that. We have monitored the traffic on this site and on this basis determined that the person concerned still managed this site.’
TorrentIt stopped serving torrents after the complaint was filed, until further notice.
It seems that BREIN’s threatening and intimidating talk still works, although Brein has no legal power.
