In February 2010, however, an event occurred which rocked the boat. Citing copyright concerns, authorities seized the domain name of Torrents.ru, the country’s biggest tracker with millions of members.

The site continues today under a new domain, Rutracker.org, with its troubles seemingly behind it. The same cannot be said for its sister operation, the adult torrent site Pornolab.net.

Despite being Russia’s 93rd most popular site, Pornolab chose to operate out of a datacenter in Ukraine. The authorities there say it was a huge operation, serving 2 million registered users. With the recent demise of Empornium and PureTNA, this may mean it was the biggest porn tracker in the world. In the last 24 hours, however, all that came to an end.

According to police in the capital, Kiev, yesterday their officers swooped on the site’s datacenter and seized its servers. Unusually for a case of this type, the complaints that led to this action were not related to copyright infringement but to the unlawful distribution of pornography.

The police are citing contraventions of Part 2 of Article 301 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine which covers crimes against children using the Internet – in this case the importation, production, sale and distribution of pornographic material without age restriction.

In addition to attempting to bring the operators of the site to justice, the police say that they will also try to identify Ukrainian users of the site. Due to the nature of BitTorrent – downloaders automatically upload too – they too are being accused of the unlawful distribution of restricted material.

In the past, Article 301 has been used by the government to shut down various publications deemed to be offensive, including literature aimed at the gay community. Punishments can extend from large fines to 5 years in prison.

Ukraine is also home to Demonoid, one of the world’s largest BitTorrent trackers. Unlike Pornolab, Demonoid expressly forbids the tracking of any adult-related content. It also goes one step further, probably to ensure it stays the correct side of the Ukrainian authorities, by banning all local traffic. Pornolab did not and according to estimates, up to 700,000 of its members called Ukraine home.

This is not the first time Ukrainian police have shut down a an adult themed torrent site. In May 2010, xsweet.net.ua was targeted for the same reasons and its 35-year-old operator arrested.

Source: Police Raid Russia’s Largest Porn BitTorrent Site

In a torrent discussion at Demonoid.me, the largest semi private BitTorrent community, a commenter with the nickname “TANP1′ claims to have a special relationship with the show. Unlike the regular downloaders, he is actually involved in the production of Bob’s Burgers, or so he claims.

“Nice to hear that people liked the show, I’m an animator on it so it’s nice to hear something positive from all the negative I’ve been hearing about! I’m going to keep seeding to support my show,” TANP1 wrote a few hours after the torrent was published on Demonoid.

Of course, anyone can claim to be an animator of the show, but as we will point out later in this article this one turns out to be legit. This is where it gets interesting.

Other commenters on Demonoid seem to be genuinely surprised and honored that one of the animators approves of their actions, since makers of such big productions are generally negative towards ‘unauthorized’ downloads. In a follow up comment TANP1 adds some more insider insights to the ‘sharing’ crowd.

“There are 13 eps for the show coming out, they’ve been well received by the everyone at the studio so far so we’re hoping everything will turn out and it’ll gain more of an audience as it goes,” he says.

The commenter went on to further state that if you view to end credits his name is listed there.

With that last comment TANP1 did give away more than he might have wanted to do. It is of course great that someone from the production team of a popular show approves of torrenting, and we welcome such an open stance. But, at the same time we got very curious about the identity of the torrenting animator, if only to verify the legitimacy of his claims.

Since it’s hard to hide something on the internet nowadays, it only took a few Google searches to find out that the nickname and the birthday of the commenter are linked to an animator featured first in the credits list of the episode. So, the story seems to check out and we applaud TANP1 for making Bob’s Burgers available – in more ways than one.

Update: We’ve been in contact with the animator and agreed to alter some of the info mentioned in the above article to address his concerns.

Source: Bob’s Burgers Animator Helps Seeding The Show’s Torrent

A few months after the announcement the deal eventually bounced. Although GGF’s shareholders agreed to the acquisition, the company failed to come up with the required $7.8m (SEK 60 million). What followed was mostly silence and the deadline for the acquisition eventually passed without an official response from the company.

Many thought that the company had abandoned its BitTorrent plans for good, but behind the scenes it was preparing for a second shockwave. In the last month GGF CEO Hans Pandeya has been continuing his plans to acquire one or more torrent sites to start an industry approved entertainment platform. One of the prime targets for a takeover at the moment is the popular BitTorrent site Demonoid, but other sites have been approached as well.

“I have finally managed to get some funds in place and want to acquire Demonoid and some other sites to execute my plans,” Pandeya told TorrentFreak. “I lost a year and a fortune due to Aktietorget’s [the equity marketplace] acrobatics during my attempt to acquire The Pirate Bay in 2009 but I think it is still not too late to acquire and convert torrent sites.”

Whether Demonoid is open for an acquisition by GGF remains to be seen. The site’s owner has not commented on the proposal yet but Pandeya hopes there will be a favorable response to his plans.

It has never been a secret that GGF was interested in buying more than one torrent site to build its entertainment empire. Last year, when all eyes were pointed at GGF’s takeover of The Pirate Bay, the company also put in a 20 million euro behind-the-scenes offer for fellow BitTorrent site Mininova. Even today, Pandeya is still interested in reactivating the deal with The Pirate Bay.

“The Pirate Bay and Isohunt are on my Most Wanted list of course but I have to take one step at a time. I hope it is going to work this time. There is a positive attitude towards out-of-the-box thinking in the US which seems to be essential for this project so keep your fingers crossed.”

It is questionable how realistic Pandeya’s most wanted list is in terms of takeover potential. TorrentFreak contacted representatives of The Pirate Bay and isoHunt who both assured us that they are not interested in a deal with GGF at the moment, not least because they doubt Pandeya actually has any money to splash around.

The owner of Demonoid, the prime target of GGF at the moment, was contacted for a comment but we haven’t heard back at the time of publication. Despite all the skepticism, Pandeya firmly believes in his plans to transform torrent sites into ‘legal’ music and movie stores, and there is little doubt that this won’t be the last we hear of it.

“My plan is doable,” Pandeya said.

Update: Demonoid’s owner got back to us. We were told that he has no intention to sell the site to Global Gaming Factory. This means that Pandeya has to find another candidate to carry out his plans. Demonoid will remain as it is.

Source: GGF Plans To Buy and Legalize Demonoid

Threats from the movie and music industry aside, Demonoid has also been the target for dozens of large and small DoS attacks. Usually these attacks only slow the site down a bit, and in the worst case they result in several hours of downtime before Demonoid staff takes care of the problem.

During mid-June reports started to come in to TorrentFreak from Chinese and Taiwanese Demonoid users who complained that the site was inaccessible to them. Both the site and tracker were no longer functioning. Browsers reported a “server not found” error and torrents with a Demonoid tracker returned a “error: hostname not found” message.

For the affected users this could mean only two things. Since Demonoid was working fine in other countries, either Chinese and Taiwanese ISPs has started to block Demonoid’s website and tracker, or the people running Demonoid had decided to block IP-ranges from these countries.

To find out more about the origin of the connection issues, a TorrentFreak reader based in Taiwan decided to contact his Internet provider, who dismissed the first option after some investigating.

“We cannot access Demonoid.com either,” he was informed by his ISP. “We attempted to access the site via the other ISPs in Taiwan but all these attempts failed. We determined that there is no connection problem. The Demonoid server is rejecting all requests from Taiwanese IP-addresses.”

Despite the fact that Demonoid’s owner has never responded to our inquiries in the past, we asked for a comment on the blocking issue and got a swift response. Indeed, as we initially guessed, Demonoid is actively blocking IP-ranges in Taiwan and parts of China because that’s where the DoS attacks come from.

“There is a DoS coming mostly from there,” Demonoid’s admin told TorrentFreak in a brief reply.

We have yet to receive an answer to the question whether the block is temporary or permanent. In the meantime, affected users can bypass the restrictions by using a VPN-service. Both ItsHidden and VPNReactor offer free, but limited accounts.

Source: Demonoid Blocks Taiwan and China After DoS Attack

Yesterday, Demonoid once again disappeared leaving its users behind with lots of questions and in a mild state of panic. As is often the case, Demonoid’s admins have remained silent and rumors of a hostile intervention have quickly grown. Thus far, however, there is no reason to assume that the downtime is caused by ‘legal’ reasons. It has to be assumed that the site is facing hardware or network problems.

On the positive side, we can report that Demonoid’s trackers appear to be working just fine. This is no guarantee that the site itself will make a quick return though. Last September the site vanished into thin air and although the tracker returned early November, it took until Christmas before the site was fully operational again.

Last year’s downtime was not unique either. Since 2007 the site has been offline for more than 13 months in total, due to all kinds of problems including issues with the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA. Hardware issues and trouble finding a reliable hosting outfit were some of the other explanations that were given in the past.

In a rare interview with Demonoid’s current hosting provider a few months ago we found out that DDoS-attacks and legal issues are unlikely to take the site offline, so we can only guess what the real reason for the ccurrent outage is. The wait has started, once again.

Update: Demonoid is responding (very slow) to some people, and the reason for the downtime seems to be a DDoS attack after all.

Source: Demonoid Faces Major Downtime Once Again

Despite this extended downtime, the semi-private tracker came in at an impressive 20th place in our list of Top 25 torrent sites of 2009.

With hundreds and thousands of daily visitors and an Alexa rank of 657 last month, it’s undoubtedly a popular site, especially since one needs an invite to gain access.

Well, normally that’s the case. Currently the situation is different.

Whether this is a bug (maybe as a result of the admins having to rewrite some of the site code after the crash) or entirely intentional, we just don’t know, but currently it seems that anyone can browse and download torrents from Demonoid without being a member.

We’re not exactly sure how long this has been the case, but it has been a little while now, perhaps since the site returned after its break.

Demonoid, it seems, has changed from a semi-private to a public tracker.

Enjoy!

Update: A few people have mentioned that it’s been possible to download 3 to 5 torrents a week as a guest in the past. After downloading a dozen today, we’ve still not reached any limit.

Source: Demonoid Is Open To All Without An Invite

An update on the situation was not good, with the site owners forecasting severe data loss. Some user data and torrent files were predicted to be lost forever and the site’s code had been seriously damaged.

Then, on November 5th, Demonoid’s tracker began to function again, which was followed by another announcement by the site owners. None of the negative rumors and speculation were true – Demonoid would soon return.

“The parts of the site code that got deleted are being rewritten and should be ready soon. We are also working to try and minimize the data loss as much as possible,” they announced.

Since then, nothing much has happened, but a few hours ago Demonoid users discovered they are to get an early Christmas present.

At around 1:30am EST, Demonoid reappeared and started accepting logins from registered users.

“Hello! We are currently testing the newly written code. More downtime is hopefully not necessary, but might be a possibility. Welcome back, we missed you!” the admins said in an announcement.

In respect of the concerns over data loss, it appears that the latest database entries run to Friday September 11th 2009, but of course, Demonoid users are already uploading new torrents, reported to be as many as 150 thus far.

A TorrentFreak reader who as been following the situation since the site’s return told us: “Some users on the IRC channel (which still is active) report not being able to log in. Those that can log in have all noticed that their ratios were pretty much what they remembered them to be before the long downtime. I was able to log in just fine on my first attempt with correct ratio as well.”

As the site deals with various issues, it became a little unstable around 2 to 3 hours after its initial return and then went down again around 4:00am EST.

Although Demonoid’s RSS feeds aren’t functioning, at the time of writing the site appears to be running again, and displaying their famous demon logo all decked out in a santa hat.

Christmas really has come early for Demonoid fans. All that is need now is a gift for everyone in the community – a period of open registrations.

Source: Christmas Comes Early For BitTorrent – Demonoid is Back

Some user data and torrent files are unfortunately gone for good and the site’s code has been permanently damaged. This resulted in the extended downtime that persists through today.

Since Demonoid’s owners are not very talkative it didn’t take long before imposters created their own news about the site, causing wild rumors to spread among Demonoid’s fans. Some reported that the site would return under a new name and others claimed that the authorities had permanently shut it down.

In a rare update, Demonoid staff have informed their users that none of this is true. Demonoid will return and things will return to normal as soon as possible.

“There are some rumors about the site shutting down for good and we [sic] starting a new tracker next year. The rumors are of course, lies. There are no plans of shutting down or creating another site,” Demonoid staff write.

Aside from refuting those rumors, the staff update brings more good news. A full comeback of the Demonoid site is looming. Parts of the code had to be rewritten in order to get the site back up and this process is almost finished.

“The parts of the site code that got deleted are being rewritten and should be ready soon. We are also working to try and minimize the data loss as much as possible,” the Demonoid team adds.

As reported earlier, the tracker is already back up and running smoothly, and considering the latest update from Demonoid staff, it shouldn’t take long before the site itself is also recovered.

Source: Demonoid Rewrites Code, Comeback is Imminent

As always, Demonoid staff kept quiet about the site’s future and all its users could do is wait for a sign of life, which quietly arrived earlier today.

A few hours ago Demonoid’s tracker started to respond again. It appears that it’s still hosted in Ukraine, and although the frontend of the site hasn’t updated yet, this comeback might indicate that the site is preparing for a full return.

The current situation stirs memories of Demonoid’s downtime back in 2007. At the time the tracker also returned before the site itself became accessible again, which took two more months. Many Demonoid members are undoubtedly hoping that this chain of events will complete more quickly this time around.

When the site returns, it’s likely that members that joined the site more recently will have to sign up again, while others may have to resubmit their torrents. “A loss of some months worth of activity including registered users and torrent submissions is to be expected,” Demonoid staff warned earlier.

The tracker’s return in itself is already being welcomed by the thousands of users whose torrent clients are not supporting trackerless torrents. Many of them might have been staring at several unfinished downloads for weeks, and now they are finally able to complete their downloads.

Source: Demonoid is Alive, The Tracker Has Returned

One major site that has showed an acute aversion to saying just about anything to outsiders is Demonoid. This semi-private site has nevertheless made the news dozens of times, most recently due to its recent downtime, as reported here on TorrentFreak.

“We are experiencing power outages that have caused some ram and hard drive issues. We might have to shut down everything to fix and prevent further damage,” said Demonoid in a statement six weeks ago, warning that downtime could run to “…days maybe, until we can change the power circuit.”

However, TorrentFreak has received possibly conflicting information from Demonoid’s host, Colocall in Ukraine, who said in a statement: “There were no problems with power supply at the location where Demonoid servers are hosted.”

While information about Demonoid is always scarce, information coming out of Colocall is a rarity too, since the company has previously refused to speak with journalists about their most infamous customer. That’s why it was of great interest when Ukrainian blogger Pavel Golubovskiy contacted TorrentFreak to say he had netted an interview with Colocall. Here is a translation of the questions related to Demonoid;

Why did you choose to host Demonoid?

The customer came to us and ordered a particular service. For us it wasn’t a political decision, Demonoid is an ordinary client for us.

What exactly do you host, the inferno.demonoid.com tracker?

They brought their servers, which are now located in our data center. We don’t know what information is stored there – we do not have access to this information. These servers are supported remotely by Demonoid technical staff.

Is there a way to contact the Demonoid admins?

They will not answer you. Many people want to contact them – journalists, fans, police, local authorities from different countries. But the Demonoid admins have a very selective approach to e-mail correspondence. When the police wanted to contact them, I specifically warned the admins that they had to respond to this request.

So the police already inquired about Demonoid?

Well, our local authorities are interested in Demonoid all the time. Rightholders associations are constantly trying to put pressure on us, including pressure with the help of Ukrainian authorities. We redirect them to the admins, but do not interfere or try to negotiate.

Are they putting any serious pressure on you?

It sounds strange, but Ukraine is still a jural state. Therefore IFPI’s personal opinion is just that, their personal opinion, despite the fact that the budgets of the IFPI participants are comparable to the budget of the Ukraine.

Aren’t you afraid that there can be a similar situation with Demonoid’s servers as there was with Infostore.org site? [famous Ukrainian file-sharing site, its servers were confiscated by police about a year ago]

As a hosting-provider we take such risks into account. This can happen not only with Demonoid, but with any client. We do not control what information is stored on servers, anybody can buy our hosting service.

Anti-pirates and the media-lobby are now trying to shift all the responsibility for file-sharing onto Internet providers, so that providers will have to monitor user activities. Will this affect hosting providers too?

We have such laws in draft in our parliament periodically. But the Ukrainian law “On communication” is clear about this: providers are not responsible for what their customers do. And the fact that rights holders want to change that is their personal opinion, they are not legislative bodies. Let them buy a parliament member and lobby for such law, then we will observe this law. But until then they are nobody to us, and we are nobody for them too.

About a month ago Demonoid reported technical problems. Due to those problems all data for the last several months has vanished. In an attempt to recover from these problems the site went offline. Do you know what happened?

Some time ago several of their hard-drives crashed. But that was several months ago and we don’t know what was the reason of recent problems.

According to their admins, the man who can restore the tracker is not available. Are they speaking about some Colocall programmer?

No, all the technical support of servers is performed remotely. They aren’t speaking about one of our specialists.

Torrentfreak wrote about the president of Lithuanian antipirates, who demanded the closure of access to Demonoid. He said that it is very hard to even make contact with you. Have you spoken with him?

Yes, someone called us. We just could not speak with him: from the start of the conversation he immediately began to threaten us, he was absolutely non-constructive. We sent him to the court and have said that if he brings the court’s decision, we will be happy to execute it, because we observe all Ukrainian laws. Until then we are not going to speak with him.

Access to Demonoid is blocked for several countries including Ukraine. Is this your initiative or the tracker’s decision?

It is the tracker’s policy, not our initiative. I think this is due to DDoS-attacks.

Are there any DDoS-attacks aiming at Demonoid?

Yes, there are many large and serious DDoS-attacks. But they are always the problem of every hosting provider. We have learned how to neutralize them, so such attacks have almost no effect on Demonoid’s operations. And, incidentally, Demonoid isn’t the only site to be attacked: during the last election we hosted the server of the central election commission committee, it was constantly under DDoS-attacks.

Source: Demonoid: An Interview With Their Ukranian Host

One major site having serious technical issues at the moment is Demonoid. At the beginning of September, TorrrentFreak reported that the Ukranian-based site would go down for possibly-extended downtime due to some hardware problems.

“We are experiencing power outages that have caused some ram and hard drive issues,” site staff sad in a statement. “We might have to shut down everything to fix and prevent further damage,” they added, while warning that the site could disappear for days while the site’s power circuit received maintenance.

Since we receive questions daily from worried users on the situation at Demonoid, an update seems in order. Unfortunately, at this stage it doesn’t seem like good news.

Although staff at the site say they hope Demonoid will return as soon as possible, they have confirmed that the hardware issues have caused severe data loss. This problem is compounded by the fact that the person who can get the data back is unavailable to assist at the moment.

“A loss of a some months worth of activity including registered users and torrent submissions is to be expected because the backup we are hoping to get back is not up to date, so please be prepared for it,” Demonoid staff said in a statement.

When ‘the backup guy’ has worked his magic the site will return. In the meantime, anyone getting public BitTorrent site withdrawal symptoms can check out our alternatives list.

Source: Demonoid Warns Of Severe Torrent and User Data Loss

During the next few days, maybe hours, Demonoid may go down due to some serious-sounding technical issues. They have already caused some damage to the site so the operators want to limit further damage.

“We are experiencing power outages that have caused some ram and hard drive issues. We might have to shut down everything to fix and prevent further damage,” they say in a statement.

The downtime could be extended, “…days maybe, until we can change the power circuit,” they add.

Several Demonoid users already report connection issues, but the site is still accessible to most people at the time of writing. The blackout won’t mean much to millions of Russian and Ukrainian BitTorrent users though, since they are already blocked from the site.

Over the years Demonoid has had its fair share of downtime. In June 2007 Demonoid was pressured to leave their host in the Netherlands, mainly because of legal threats from the Dutch anti-piracy outfit, BREIN. The site then relocated to Canada, but after threats from the CRIA, it decided to shut down there as well.

In 2008 the site eventually reappeared in full glory after being offline for six months. This time the downtime shouldn’t last that long. Any Demonoid users stuck for ideas on alternatives if the site goes down, can check here. If you’re looking for high speed downloads you could also consider to try Usenet instead (our Usenet guide).

Source: Demonoid BitTorrent Tracker Could Go Dark For Days

In the past 24 hours, TorrentFreak received a flurry of reports that users of Demonoid in Russia could no longer access the site. After checking with some of our own Russian contacts and testing via a server located in St Petersburg, we are able to confirm that at least so far, accessing Demonoid is impossible from Russia. Reports suggest the problem started a day ago.

Traceroutes carried out from several locations across the country to Demonoid’s IP at 62.149.24.66 show that they are all terminating at ColoCall, the biggest data center in Ukraine – just one step away from Demonoid’s servers.

TorrentFreak’s tests from both European and Russian IP addresses both routed through the ColoCall IP 62.149.2.108 – the Russian test was blocked at that point while the European one completed perfectly. Tests by a Russian BitTorrent user on our behalf confirmed it was necessary to use a proxy for both the site and the the tracker to gain access.

It’s hoped that the blockage is temporary and a technical issue but of course, Demonoid has blocked countries before. TorrentFreak has contacted ColoCall but thus far, we’ve received no response.

We’ll update this post when more information comes in.

Update: Several reports coming in that Ukranian IP addresses may also be blocked.

Source: Demonoid BitTorrent Tracker Blocked for Russians

According to the U.S. attorney’s office, yesterday a federal grand jury indicted Derek Hawthorne of Moorpark and Owen Moody of San Marcos on federal copyright violation charges.

Hawthorne is charged with uploading ‘Australia’ to a torrent site known as Movie Hogs and ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ to Demonoid.com. Moody is charged with uploading the hit movie “Slumdog Millionaire” to The Pirate Bay.

The pair have been contacted by the FBI who ordered them to surrender to authorities next week. The charges are ‘Uploading a copyrighted work being prepared for commercial distribution’ which is a term under the tough Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, previously used to jail Star Wars uploaders at the now-defunct EliteTorrents site.

They face a possible punishment of three years in jail and fines of $250,000.

Authorities also arrested a third man last week. Jack Yates of Porter Ranch, an employee at a Los Angeles duplication company, is accused of illegally copying the movie ‘The Love Guru’. Yates was asked to copy the movie by Paramount so that Jay Leno could show a clip on his show but allegedly he also made a copy for himself which he passed to friends, one of which uploaded the movie to the Internet.

It’s alleged that Yates lied to the FBI so he faces stiffer punishment than the previously mentioned pair. The offense of copying the movie carries a sentence of up to a year in jail but for lying to the authorities he could get five years. He is scheduled to be arraigned March 16 2009.

Source: FBI Tracks Down Oscars BitTorrent Uploaders

These sort of problem – when users in one geographical location can access a site when others can’t – is usually down to DNS issues which generally resolve themselves in a short time. However, in the case of Demonoid, this doesn’t appear to offer the answer.

According to reports we’ve received, when users from the Netherlands try to access Demonoid all they get is a blank white page. However, should they try to access the site using a proxy or VPN making the visitor appear they are not from the Netherlands, the user can now gain access. The block happens on all the major ISPs, and are persistent.

Canadians, having been previously blocked, remain unblocked, presumably after Demonoid fell out of range of the CRIA. However, more recently reports indicate that not only are Dutch users blocked from Demonoid, but in an unlikely scenario, Brazilians appear to be blocked too. So what could be at the bottom of this?

There could be some purely technical issues with the web, but as time goes on, this seems less and less likely. It is of course possible that Demonoid itself has some technical problems, having reported that the site had a few bugs to be ironed out around 9 days ago or so. If this is the case, there will be lots of relieved people around.

It’s also possible that there is a legal angle to these blocks, after all this type of action by Demonoid isn’t new in its quest to stay within the law. Around 12 months ago Demonoid blocked Dutch users for a while, as the pressure from BREIN increased quietly behind the scenes, and then later on very publicly blocked millions of Canadians following pressure from the CRIA, only to unblock them again after moving to ‘safer’ Ukraine-based hosting.

But, if Ukraine is ‘safe’ as a host country, why block the Netherlands, and why block Brazil of all places? As it turns out there is a Demonoid/Brazil link, in that the Demonoid.com domain has a protected WHOIS provided by the Brazilian-based Neurocube.com, which in turn is hosted in the Netherlands at Demonoid’s old host, LeaseWeb. And of course, Netherlands-based anti-piracy group BREIN aren’t the biggest supporters of Demonoid either – and have lots of resources – but whether or not they still hold anything over the site in order to force a block of an entire country is a matter of speculation.

In the absence of any announcement from the new admin of Demonoid (which seems incredibly unlikely), it’s some users of Demonoid who asked us to find out why they can’t access the site. Unfortunately, we don’t have the answer for them right now, maybe they will become more clear in the future.

In the meantime, please keep us updated in the comments with access reports from your country and we’ll try to keep people updated on the position for Dutch and Brazilian Demonoid fans. If you can or cannot access Demonoid, we’d like to hear from you.

Source: Reports: Demonoid Blocking Countries

Being a dedicated user of Demonoid, Xihilisk is used to sharing his (and probably others) music. His previous 10 albums are all available for free on BitTorrent. However, he decided to release his latest album “EPTwo Special Edition”, exclusively on the popular BitTorrent tracker Demonoid.

This move seems to be counterintuitive, since an exclusive release on Demonoid will limit the audience. On the other hand, the album wont be exclusive for a long time. In fact, it’s the nature of p2p and BitTorrent that such releases soon spread to other sites.

We got in touch with Xihilisk to find out what motivates artists like himself to share their music on BitTorrent.

TF: Why did you decide to exclusively release your new album on Demonoid?

Xihilisk: I’ve been with Demonoid for a few years, and its always been the first place I go to look for something. I’ve been a member of quite a few other private trackers, and still am, but Demonoid has lots of obscure stuff I haven’t found anywhere else.

In terms of it suitability for this release, it has a large user base, and a decent community that seem genuinely interested in listening to music they’ve never heard of.

TF: What are the benefits of sharing your music on BitTorrent for artist like yourself?

I’ve always given away my music for free. I used to burn off a load of CDRs and hand them out to random people and leave them lying around places, then came myspace, and then the explosion of BitTorrent use. It seemed like the next logical step.

I was using torrents for a long time before I realized that if people can share major artists via the medium, then why can’t I share my own music. Of course, I knew that quite a few people were already doing this, but its still the most exciting and effective way for me to get my music to people who never would have found it otherwise.

TF: What do you think of the RIAA, and the big music labels, for going after their own customers?

Xihilisk: Fuck the RIAA. It sickens me when I hear about somebody getting fined a tonne of cash for downloading a couple of songs off LimeWire (and sharing them probably without even knowing they were). I understand that copyright infringement exists, but destroying someone’s life just for getting a few songs off the internet is disgraceful.

What I find most ironic is that you can share thousands of death metal albums online and you’ll almost certainly never find trouble, but share one Lionel Richie track and they’ll nail you to a wall.

TF: Do you think the music industry will change in let’s say the next 5 years? How do you want it to be?

Xihilisk: 5 years? What music industry? Hopefully, there will only be music.

The Internet is rapidly leveling the playing field for all musicians. I’d like to see it where all money hungry labels go out of business, and a true DIY ethic takes over. You want to get your band noticed? Make really good music and the internet will do the rest. You want to make money? Play a load of gigs or forget it.

Trying to get signed these days is a lost cause. Yes iTunes is doing well, and who knows what tricks the record companies have up their sleeves to stop people getting music illegally, but the fact is that now you’re very lucky if you can make a living from being an artist.

I’m more than happy with that fact that many thousands of people have downloaded my albums legally, for free. And maybe even listen to them!

TF: Thanks, we wish you all the best.

For those who want to check it out, the album can be downloaded at Demonoid. Xihilisk describes his as experimental indie/electronica, with a hint of chiptune, post rock, metal and several other genres.

On a sidenote, it appears that Demonoid has been inaccessible to Dutch users for a few days. The block happened after the site did some server maintenance, there is no official explanation yet, but we will post an unpdate as soon as we have more info.

Source: Artist Releases Album Exclusively on Demonoid

The resurrection of the popular BitTorrent traffic marks the end of a tough year for the site. The trouble for Demonoid started back in June last year, when the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN started to put pressure on Demonoid and their ISP, Leaseweb. Deimos decided that the Netherlands wasn’t the safe haven it used to be and he to moved the site to Canada, which resulted in a few days of downtime.

Deimos never really told the administrators or members of the site exactly what was happening. Initially, most members assumed that there was some hardware failure, but after a few days it became clear that Demonoid was more or less forced to move. Maybe there could have been hardware failures too, who knows, but the outcome was the same – Canada here we come.

Relocating the servers to Canada initially solved the problems, but, by the end of September Deimos took Demonoid offline for the second time. Again, nobody knew what was going on until we found out that the CRIA was responsible for the downtime, which was later confirmed by Deimos. It turned out that Canada wasn’t the best choice after all.

After 5 days of downtime the site returned, now blocking all traffic from Canadian users in an attempt to calm down the CRIA. At first it looked like the storm was finally over, but on November 9th Demonoid’s users were welcomed by a disappointing message on the frontpage explaining that the CRIA was indeed responsible for the downtime.

The site never came back after November last year, up until now that is. Let’s hope it lasts this time.

Source: Demonoid Is Back Online

A month ago we reported on the brief resurrection of the Demonoid tracker in Malaysia. At the time we hinted at the possibility that the site could perhaps be planning a comeback. Unfortunately the tracker went offline again after a few days. With no official response from the Demonoid team, it remains a mystery what the reason behind the resurrection was.

Now, a month later, the Demonoid tracker is again responding. Just over a week ago, Demonoid torrents began to work again, this time being tracked from Ukraine.

The new host of inferno.demonoid.com is the Ukrainian ISP Cocall Ltd, while the frontend of the site still remains in the US. Again, there is no official explanation for the return of the tracker, although many hope that it’s a sign that the site will be fully up and running soon.

Last December, Demonoid’s founder Deimos spoke about the future of the site: “Money is an issue, but the real problem at the moment is finding a suitable place to host the website. There has been no luck there.” Perhaps he now found his safe harbor in Ukraine?

Source: Demonoid Tracker Moves to Ukraine

It is of course not clear what this all means, but without an official message from the Demonoid team, speculation has started. Could it be that the site has found a new host, and preparing a return? Many former Demonoid members are secretly hoping that this is indeed the case.

Last December, Deimos, the founder and main admin of what used to be one of the most popular BitTorrent trackers, posted a message on the Subdemon forums on the possibility of a return. At the time he wrote: “Money is an issue, but the real problem at the moment is finding a suitable place to host the website. There has been no luck there. And there’s some personal stuff I need to take care of that takes most of my time at the moment, and that does not help.”

For those who forgot, here is a recap of what has happened so far. The trouble for Demonoid started back in June, when the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN started to put pressure on Demonoid and their ISP, Leaseweb. Deimos decided that the Netherlands wasn’t the safe haven it used to be and he to moved the site to Canada, which resulted in a few days of downtime.

Deimos never really told the administrators or members of the site exactly what was happening. Initially, most members assumed that there was some hardware failure, but after a few days it became clear that Demonoid was more or less forced to move. Maybe there could have been hardware failures too, who knows, but the outcome was the same – Canada here we come.

Relocating the servers to Canada initially solved the problems, but, by the end of September Deimos took Demonoid offline for the second time. Again, nobody knew what was going on until we found out that the CRIA was responsible for the downtime, which was later confirmed by Deimos. It turned out that Canada wasn’t the best choice after all.

After 5 days of downtime the site returned, now blocking all traffic from Canadian users in an attempt to calm down the CRIA. At first it looked like the storm was finally over, but on November 9th Demonoid’s users were welcomed by a disappointing message on the frontpage explaining that the CRIA was indeed responsible for the downtime.

So will Demonoid ever return? The fact that the tracker is back online, in a different location seems to suggest that there is something happening.

Update: February 20, tracker offline again after 3 days uptime.

Source: Demonoid Tracker Is Back, Will the Site be Next?

It now seems that there’s some good news for Deimos as The Pirate Bay is offering their help. In fact, they claim to have two servers lined up for Demonoid already. Pirate Bay’s Brokep made this public in a recent interview on the Subdemon techcast where he said: “We tried to contact the guys behind Demonoid and we’ve set up a tracker for them but they haven’t responded. But, we have two servers running for them if they want to set it up.” Brokep also says that he hasn’t heard back from Deimos yet, but it sure is a great gesture.

If Demonoid decides to take them up on their offer they will not be alone. In 2007 quite a lot of torrent sites moved to Sweden, and to PRQ in particular. Sweden is considered to be a safe haven for BitTorrent sites, and PRQ is popular because it is owned by TiAMO and Anakata, two of the founders of The Pirate Bay. Ironically, however, The Pirate Bay is not hosted in Sweden or at PRQ, which is probably a wise decision.

In the remainder of the interview Brokep and the interviewers discuss some of the recent news surrounding The Pirate Bay, such as the huge pile of paperwork they received last month, the new protocol they have been developing, and the explosive growth of their tracker. It is definitely worth listening to, and I’m looking forward to the next episodes of this podcast, and to more news surrounding Demonoid.

You can download the podcast, including the interview here, or stream (might be buggy) the torrent and listen to it right away, with Bitlet.

Source: The Pirate Bay: Demonoid is Welcome in Sweden

It’s been just over 6 weeks since the CRIA allegedly shut down the Demonoid BitTorrent tracker. Details were scarce at the time, with lots of people simply claiming the site had some technical or server issues. Indeed, TorrentFreak came in for quite some criticism when we claimed the CRIA was involved, but when the site returned there were some ominous signs which seemed to support our claims.

Eventually, the Demonoid trackers reappeared, followed by the site itself but was forced to block Canadian visitors by the CRIA. However, despite blocking Canadians, it seems the CRIA hasn’t yet had enough of harassing Demonoid and its host.

On Demonoid.com we now read:

“The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.”

Indeed, Demonoid’s host had previously said that if it had any major hassle, it was likely it could pull the plug on the site.

A message on the Demonoid IRC channel says: “Site is down, tracker is up. Expect the site to return, unless we hear otherwise from Deimos.”

Canada seems to becoming more unfriendly for BitTorrent sites – Demonoid aren’t the only ones being threatened by the recording labels there.

Developing story

Source: Demonoid Shuts Down Again

Following a Canadian newspaper article which branded them ‘The Pirates of Quebec’, two BitTorrent trackers have been targeted by a collective of Canadian music labels.

The administrator of the 1 year old, 46,000 member ‘QuebecTorrent‘ has received Cease and Desist letters from 4 record labels and is being threatened with further action if they don’t comply.

The demands are:

a) Close the site www.quebectorrent.com and any other site of similar nature which you operate.

b) You must agree to never again directly or indirectly operate any other service which enables the sharing of music.

c) You must post a message clearly indicating the closure of the site and inform your users that sharing music via p2p networks is forbidden by Canadian copyright law unless permission is obtained and royalties paid.

In contrast to the situation at Demonoid who chose to block Canadian users rather than close or re-locate, it appears that QuebecTorrent (QT) don’t want to take this lying down and are hoping to fight this action.

Currently the members are being rallied with a view to obtaining donations – the administrator of QT told TorrentFreak that their lawyer is charging 250$ CAD/hour and although he is financing some of the fight, he simply cannot raise all of the funds.

He told us: “The fees so far are confirmed at 2000$ CAD. I am asking the users for 1500$ and I will pay the rest.”

He also outlines two scenarios – if QuebecTorrent loses in court, it will be very bad for P2P as a favorable legal precedent for the majors would result in an anti-p2p ‘crusade’.

Equally, victory could create a favorable legal precedent for P2P which would benefit the whole file-sharing community.

In summing up, the administrator says that he has a stark choice – either people donate to support the legal defense of the site or he will have no choice but to close it in the face of pressure from these labels.

Anyone wanting to help QuebecTorrent fight should consider donating.

Stay tuned, updates to follow

Source: After Demonoid, Canadian Music Labels Take on BitTorrent Trackers

We received a letter from a lawyer representing the CRIA, they were threatening with legal action and we need to start blocking Canadian traffic because of this. Thanks for your understanding, and sorry for any inconvenience.

This confirms our earlier reports this week, and show that the CRIA was indeed responsible for the downtime. It’s been a controversial week and at times emotions were running really high. In the absence of any official announcement it was really hard to separate fact from fiction, with rumor and counter-rumor.

The bad news of course is that Demonoid is now unavailable to Canadians. Unfortunately it is not the fist time an anti-piracy organization effectively shuts down access to a part of the BitTorrent community. Earlier this week Isohunt had to ban US users from its trackers, and last month TorrentSpy blocked access to US users, both by pressure from the MPAA.

At the time we write this article, the forums are still offline, but it probably wont take long before these are back online too. The first sign of Demonoid’s return came yesterday when the trackers started responding again.

When an avalanche of upset Demonoid users came to TorrentFreak this week, the mood was grim when not only their site disappeared but also doubts were cast on our report. We aim to be a credible news source and understand the responsibility we have in the BitTorrent community. While understanding how Demonoid’s Canadian users must be feeling right now, it’s great that we now get the chance to share in the relief of the majority of Demonoid’s dedicated userbase.

The second most popular BitTorrent tracker on planet earth has returned, that’s the most important thing.

Update: Demonoid is having some problems again, this message now appears: “The latest changes to the site are giving us some problems – We’ll be back soon”

Source: Demonoid Returns, Forced to Block Canadian Traffic By the CRIA

We contacted both the CRIA and Demonoid’s ISP in an attempt to confirm the story, but they didn’t want to respond to these allegations. Both parties confirmed nor denied their involvement. In addition, we tried to get an official response from Deimos, the founder and the head admin of Demonoid, unfortunately without any result.

The general consensus in the Demonoid IRC channel now is that the downtime is caused by hardware issues, and that the site will probably return within a few days.

Others still think that the Canadian ISP took Demonoid offline after they received legal threats (from the CRIA), but this is just speculation at this point. Demonoid’s ISP said earlier that it would not hesitate to pull the plug on Demonoid if they had to, however, this explanation is less plausible now because the trackers still run on the same IP. This indicates that the servers are still hosted by their Canadian ISP.

It is great to see that the second largest BitTorrent tracker is back in action. Thousands of torrents stopped responding when the tracker went down, frustrating over a million BitTorrent users. I guess it’s time to finish these torrents.

Update: Demonoid Returns, Forced to Block Canadian Traffic By the CRIA

Source: Demonoid Trackers Back Online, Site Still Down

TorrentFreak contacted some of the Demonoid administrators, but they are not sure what happened either. It is certainly possible that Demonoid’s Canadian ISP pulled the plug after being pressured by the CRIA. The ISP said before that they would take it down if they would receive complaints.

Right now, the Demonoid server is still pinging, but the ISP could have firewalled the everything after they received some serious legal threats. Deimos, the founder and the head admin of the site is unreachable and has not responded yet.

This is not the first time Demonoid suffers major downtime due to pressure from the anti-piracy lobby. Demonoid had to move its servers from The Netherlands to Canada in June after The Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN filed a subpoena against Demonoid’s ISP. BREIN had asked the ISP to take Demonoid offline and hand over the administrator’s personal details, but Demonoid relocated their servers before any harm was done.

Unfortunately, it now seems that Canada is not the “safe haven” as they expected it to be. It is likely that Demonoid has to relocate again, for the second time in three months.

Demonoid tracks over a million .torrent files and is the second largest BitTorrent tracker after The Pirate Bay. The shutdown of the site and tracker is a huge blow for the BitTorrent community that lost 2 of the most popular BitTorrent trackers (TorrentBox was taken offline for US users a few hours ago) within 24 hours.

More info soon!

Update: Still no response from Deimos, the CRIA or Demonoid’s ISP.

Update: The CRIA and Demonoid’s ISP refuse to comment to the allegations, they don’t confirm or deny anything.

Update: The tracker is back online.

Update: Demonoid Returns, Forced to Block Canadian Traffic By the CRIA

Source: Demonoid Shut Down by the CRIA?

As reported, the outcome of the lawsuit initiated by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN could spell trouble for some of the key players in the BitTorrent landscape. Concerned about this decision, administrators at other trackers hosted at Leaseweb started looking for alternative hosts.

In an attempt to re-assure its customers, Leaseweb is set to appeal against the original court decision regarding everlasting.nu. They argue that the decision is an unacceptable restriction on freedom of expression on the Internet.

In addition Leaseweb stressed that they have nothing to do with the downtime issues Demonoid experienced this week. “Leaseweb had no contact with the owner of Demonoid this week”, Leaseweb’s lawyer noted.

The lawyers office further states that they demand that BREIN is more documented and thorough in their requests to take down BitTorrent sites. “If the ruling in the everlasing.nu case holds up, freedom of expression on the Internet would be a joke”, the lawyers said.

Tim Kuik, managing director of BREIN says Leaseweb doesn’t stand a chance because their previous request was well grounded, and everlasting.nu unmistakably engaged in unlawful behavior. Kuik further explained that illegally offering files has nothing to do with privacy and freedom of expression, as Leaseweb suggested.

To be continued…

Source: Webwereld (Dutch)

Source: Demonoid’s ISP to Appeal Against BREIN

Demonoid is probably relocating to a new “safe haven” as we speak, this also explains why it takes a few days instead of a few hours to get back online (edit: see update).

Tim Kuik, managing director of BREIN, said in response to the downtime at Demonoid (Dutch link): “They are probably playing hide and seek. We want Leaseweb to take and keep this, and other illegal sites offline.”

This the the fist time that BREIN takes on one of the bigger BitTorrent sites. Last week they won a lawsuit against Leaseweb in a similar case, this could spell trouble for Demonoid.

In this case the Amsterdam court decided that Leaseweb had to take down everlasting.nu and hand over the name and address of the owner. Additionally, Leaseweb was forced to take down everlasting.nu, in case the site returns in the near future. The same thing could now happen to Demonoid.

Nearly 94% of the .torrent files on Demonoid are used to download copyrighted material according to research by TNO. BREIN will probably use this figure in court to convince the Judge that Demonoid is mainly used to download infringing content.

Update: Demonoid now has a message on the frontpage stating that the downtime is not related to the subpoena.

Stay tuned for updates

Source: Anti-Piracy Organization Tries to Shut Down Demonoid

However, the current downtime of Demonoid has nothing to do with legal actions, but with hardware issues. The Demonoid team says they are currently replacing harddrives, and that it could take a few days before the site is back up.

The timeline given indicated that this is more than a regular hardware update. The downtime is probably caused by harddrive failure.

The official announcement in the Demonoid IRC channel is:

“Site offline for a few days while harddrives get replaced”

At this point it is still uncertain if any data is permanently lost or how long it will take to get things up and running. According to one of the admins It looks like the most recent data is lost for good. The good news is that there are backups, but these are a few days old.

Luckily the Demonoid trackers are not affected by the downtime. Demonoid is still one of the most used trackers, any downtime of the tracker will make thousands of torrents unusable in clients without DHT and multi-tracker support.

Update:

Demonoid placed this message on the frontpage:

We had a system problem which will force us to restore everything from backup.
The disks are pretty much empty right now and until we are able to upload the backup and set up everything up, we have to close down.

Source: Demonoid Offline For a Few Days

“It looks like we’re not going to be very safe anymore on Leaseweb, we are putting backups in place on another location, just in case.”

This Thursday, the Amsterdam court concluded that everlasting.nu structurally facilitated copyright infringement by allowing their users to download copyrighted content via torrents hosted on their site.

Leaseweb’s lawyers argued that there was no evidence that these torrents really pointed to copyrighted works. They referred to the fact that rights holders often upload fake files themselves and that the name of a .torrent file is not sufficient to prove that copyrighted works are being distributed. Brein responded to this argument by stating that everlasting.nu then would be a very customer unfriendly BitTorrent site if this was the case, and the judge agreed with this.

At the end of the hearing the court decided that Leaseweb has to take down everlasting.nu and hand over the name and address of the owner. Additionally, Leaseweb is obliged to take down everlasting.nu, in case the site returns in the near future.

It still remains unclear what made the judge decide that everlasting is facilitating copyright infringement and how this will affect the position of all the other BitTorrent sites hosted by Leaseweb. The fact that everlasting has their own BitTorrent tracker was not used as an argument in the decision. So does this mean that hosting .torrent files is illegal now?

Brein sure thinks so, they already announced another lawsuit against Leaseweb to take down another BitTorrent site. At this point it is not sure whether this is one of the big players like Torrentspy, BTjunkie and Demonoid, or yet again a smaller BitTorrent site.

To be continued.

Source: BitTorrent Sites Safe Haven Under Threat

Plans for the BitTorrent Store were made public in March, after which Warner Bros announced that it would sell movies and TV shows on it, once it went live.

Despite Warner Bros backing, the company seems to be having problems getting other content companies on board. Restricting downloads to people who have paid for a file could prove to be a difficult task. Private trackers like Demonoid.com are already doing something along the lines of this by only allowing their members to download torrents, but implementing a commercial BitTorrent system without using DRM is no easy task. Who’s stopping anyone from re-uploading the torrent onto another, public tracker?

On the other hand, BitTorrent is a medium scores of people are already used to and love. Isn’t that how Napster made its money? First there was a P2P program that was being used to swap copyrighted songs, then the company was forced to go legit and a significant part of the user base went along to become paid subscribers.

“The MPAA tells us that 650,000 movies are being downloaded every year, and nobody’s getting paid. We see P2P being utilized so that the publisher, the artist and the ISPs all get paid for the content,” said Lily Lin, a spokeswoman for BitTorrent Inc. In September, Lin told TorrentFreak that the company was still negotiating with other studios and independent artists, trying to get them to sell their content on the BitTorrent Store.

Source: BitTorrent.com Delays Long Awaited Video Store

John from Searching Unlimited LTD, one of the masterminds behind the project told TorrentFreak that he is happy that he was able to bring these brilliant people together and recruit some of the web’s most gifted engineers.

Although the sites are sold to Searching Unlimited LTD, the site owners stay in charge of daily operation.

John Gotts explained:

All BitTorrent admins who sell their site will own a part of Searching Unlimited LTD, the parent company. However, they all will continue to own and operate the site they sell us. Additionally they will get pay and advertising revenue share of both their old company and any new projects they help create or support.

Gotts added that the great thing about this initiative is the brain trust that they are creating at Searching. “It’s a family of companies, and the huge amount of traffic we generate, together with the genius people who are involved, make it a very powerful family”.

BitTorrent sites make up for a significant portion of the total Web traffic. Teaming up all these high traffic BitTorrent sites (combined with their other projects) will instantly make them a big and powerful player on the online advertising market.

Stay tuned!

Source: BitTorrent sites sell up

It appears that Demonoid teamed-up with searching.com. Searching.com is a search engine that is buying itself into several BitTorrent sites in order to boost their alexa ranking (more on this later).

This deal brings in some extra cash for demonoid, so they are finally able to keep on growing.

At this point Demonoid already is one of the most popular public BitTorrent trackers, together with The Piratebay. As a semi-private tracker they even made it into the list of the 1000 most popular sites on the Internet (no. 983).

On demonoid we read:

We are now working in conjunction with Searching.com
Among other benefits, this will allow us to open the registrations more often, as you may have noticed by messages indicating we plan to open them once a week, and will be very good for Demonoid in the long run.

Finally people can stop begging for Demonoid invites! To illustrate how desperately people want these invites, here’s a true story.

Source: Demonoid Opens Registration during the Weekends

Within no time the post became the “most commented post” on this site. I decided to close the comments, but that resulted in numerous “demonoid invite please” emails to the email address listed in the contact section.

The “invite begs will be ignored” message didn’t stop people from sending them anyway. My last, and most desperate move was to include the following line in the demonoid post

If you want an invite, take a picture of yourself holding a cardboard sign with “demonoid invite please” written on it.

I was convinced that this would scare most people away.

But a couple of hours after I posted that line the first photo’s started to appear in my inbox. Some real ones, some photoshopped, some black with the excuse that the camera fell in the water. As shocked as I was by these responses, so I decided to take down the message, and live with the invite begs. As you can see, I’ve included an extra adsense block to pay for the expenses.

Source: Demonoid Invites Anyone?

Update June 26, 2007
Demonoid Offline For a Few Days

Update January 3 2007

Demonoid is currently down for maintenance
Will be back soon

Just to let you know, demonoid.com is open for registration. Demonoid is one of the biggest private torrent sites on the web and the most widely used BitTorrent tracker, together with the piratebay.

Get in before it’s too late.

You will be rewarded!

Source: Demonoid Open for Registration