Unfortunately this astronomical growth didn’t last. In April the meta-search engine stopped indexing sites like The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, and other sources that provide links to unauthorized copyrighted files. They even considered selling the site at the time, but this never went though. Unsurprisingly, this change cost the site most of its visitors, who moved on to YouTorrent alternatives.

After a while however, the traffic stabilized, and a few weeks later it started to grow again. Today, four months after this drastic change, YouTorrent is ready to move on, as it launches the largest legal torrent search engine with tens of thousands of torrents adding up to a whopping 6TB of data.

“We feel that a full meta-search engine is a better experience for our users considering our switch to legal content,” Patrick, the co-founder of YouTorrent said. “We now return accurate seed and peer data and results are quick and easy to navigate, and more in line with traditional search engine result pages.”

The new site searches verified torrents on sites such as Jamendo, Vuze, BitTorrent, Legaltorrents, Legittorrents, Gameupdates, Wortharchiving, BT.etree and Mininova’s featured torrents section. By default the results are ordered by relevance, but they can also be sorted by number of seeds and peers, the size of the torrent, the upload dates and the number of total downloads so far.

For music files, YouTorrent has also included a link to the Bitlet streaming tool, so users can preview tracks before they decide whether or not they want to download them. Similar to the old design, there is a list of related searches in the sidebar, which may serve as inspiration. The YouTorrent blog has been updated, and has some great content as well.

Patrick further told us that they are currently working on a content distribution platform. This will allow individual publishers to upload files to the site, and YouTorrent will make sure that the files are seeded. The content distribution platform will be similar to Mininova’s CD, but Patrick assured us that it will include some great features that are unique to YouTorrent.

“Although we have lost some traffic we are still very popular and serving hundreds of thousands of searches a day,” Patrick said. “This is very encouraging and we believe with the new service this will continue to grow as our content aggregation reach and depth increases.”

Going legal has cost the site more than half of its traffic. The new interface and several other updates are aiming to get at least some of these visitors back, and make the site one of the big players in the “legal” torrent niche. Time will tell if they have made the right decision.

YouTorrent’s New Look

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The downloaded movies can be played with any media player, and are free of DRM. On top of that, the download manager comes with a built in DVD-burner so you can burn the movies onto a disk and play them with any standalone DVD-player.

One of the interesting things about the service is that it rewards people who share their purchases. That is, people get credits for sharing the downloaded files with other Headweb users.

Peter Alvarsson of Headweb told TorrentFreak: “We believe it’s fair to pay for our users’ time and resources and we give credits back to those that upload to other users. The ratio is 1 credit per 10mb which makes it possible to get a free movie after some 50 GB upload.

“We’ve seen that some users are really good at predicting “hot” movies and earn a lot of credits by keeping their clients running after the download has finished,” Peter added. A win-win situation really, the sharing mechanism saves Headweb bandwidth and server resources, and the users get free downloads.

All movies offered by Headweb are DRM-free, which is great, and quite unique for a movie download service. Not surprisingly, they had a hard time convincing the movie studios to offer their content without access restrictions.

“It has taken us nearly 2 years to convince movie studios that DRM-free downloads are the future,” says Peter “We’re not there yet with everyone but we are getting closer. More studios now start to realize that DRM isn’t consumer friendly and that it has to go.”

Several surveys have shown that a lot of people are willing to pay to download movies as long a there is enough content available, and if the files are high quality and thus DRM-free.

Headweb’s users seem to confirm these findings. “We’ve received lot of feedback from people telling us that they would switch to support legal services completely, if only the services had the same selection,” Peter told TorrentFreak.

In the near future, Headweb will be working on more new features, groundbreaking innovations and more content. em toThey are confident that this will enable them to compete with The Pirate Bay.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Music
BTetree (p2p friendly music)
Filesoup (Open Source torrents)
DJmixes (mixes)
Jamendo (CC licensed albums)
Ampfea
SXSW (South by South West music festival)

Artists
Decemberists (music video)
Harvey Danger (album)

Software
http://linuxtracker.org/ (linux torrents)
OpenOffice (office but free)

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Legal Torrents
* Games, Music and Software
* Movies and Videos

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.