The trackers were listed as number one and two in our latest list of most-used trackers, and both are generally coordinating the downloads of 20 million people at any given point in time.

Despite the seemingly neutral setup, OpenBitTorrent has had its fair share of legal issues in the last year. Both Hollywood and the music industry have declared war against what they see as an illegal service. After Hollywood won its case against the former provider of OpenBitTorrent, IFPI went after its new host in Spain, forcing the tracker to move again.

Considering this turbulent history, it is no surprise that many users were fearing the worst when OpenBitTorrent became unresponsive last week. However, this time the outages have nothing to do with legal threats.

TorrentFreak contacted the operator of the tracker who informed us that the downtime is related to an increasing number of users. The servers are simply overloaded and can’t handle all requests. We were ensured that the problems will be dealt with but it is expected that this might take a few days.

As a direct result of the problems at OpenBitTorrent, the only other major tracker PublicBitTorrent had to deal with many extra users, again causing trouble. This week, PublicBitTorrent has been unresponsive for half of the time as their servers are overloaded as well. This is a prime example of how vulnerable the BitTorrent tracker ecosystem is.

The operator of PublicBitTorrent told TorrentFreak that extra servers are on the way. Hopefully this will solve the problems, but it is expected to take up to a week before everything’s setup properly.

The upside to all the bad news is that most people can still download torrents. Instead of using a tracker, most downloads work fine when they solely rely on DHT and PEX. Hopefully, both trackers will be fully functioning by the end of next week.

Source: Top BitTorrent Trackers Face Major Downtime

Under Spanish law torrent sites and BitTorrent trackers deemed legal even though some of its users may be using it to download copyright infringing content. This might be one of the reasons why the OpenBitTorrent tracker moved to a Spanish host after Hollywood managed to get a court decision in their favor against its Swedish hosting provider.

The OpenBitTorrent tracker, which doesn’t link to or host any torrent files and is not linked to any torrent search engine, merely serves as a facilitator of the communication between torrent users, much like BitTorrent clients do. This means that the site is not breaking any laws in Spain.

“According to all Spanish legal resolutions, a link does not communicate nor reproduces the work under intellectual property,” copyright expert and lawyer Javier de la Cueva told TorrentFreak. “So, linking is not a violation, hosting without the rights holders permission is.”

Despite this seemingly safe legal environment, music industry lobby group IFPI decided to go after OpenBitTorrent’s new hosting company in Spain. A few days after OpenBitTorrent moved to SoloGigabit, its owners received a threatening letter stating that the hosting company could be “liable for aiding and abetting criminal copyright infringements and receiving payments from criminal activity.”

In their communication with SoloGigabit, IFPI argues that OpenBitTorrent is facilitating copyright infringements because users of The Pirate Bay may be using the tracker. “The tracker performs a key function for the BitTorrent file sharing service provided by The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay service has been judged illegal in several countries,” IFPI writes, referring to the Swedish criminal trial that’s currently under appeal.

“The OpenBitTorrent tracker does not itself host any copyright protected works, but enables the infringement of sound recordings and other copyright works to take place by its role in The Pirate Bay file sharing service. The copyright works are made available and infringed by users of OpenBitTorrent and The Pirate Bay,” IFPI explains.

Feeling threatened by IFPI’s letter, the owner of the hosting company decided to inform OpenBitTorrent’s operator that they have to find a new bandwidth provider by the end of July. This means that, again, OpenBitTorrent has to move to a new location, this time as the result of mere threats.

TorrentFreak contacted the owner of SoloGigabit who told us that he was not sure what to do with IFPI’s complaints. After we informed the owner about the legality of BitTorrent trackers in Spain he doubted whether he had taken the right decision. However, successful or not, a lengthy battle in court is a huge burden for a small hosting company. Even though SoloGigabit might have the law on their site it is understandable that the owner is hesitant to fight IFPI.

Whatever happens, OpenBitTorrent is determined to stay online. The tracker’s operators told TorrentFreak that they are prepared to move to a new location again. This time, they hope to find a company that is less prone to threats from the music industry.

Source: Music Industry Threatens OpenBitTorrent’s New Hosting Provider

Of all the BitTorrent related websites OpenBitTorrent has been one of the most surprising targets. The tracker, which doesn’t link to or host any torrent files and is not linked to any torrent search engine, merely serves as a facilitator of the communication between torrent users, much like BitTorrent clients do.

Despite this neutral and apparent non-infringing setup, the Swedish Court of Appeals ruled against the site two weeks ago. In a surprising verdict in a case started by Hollywood movie companies, the Court handed out an injunction to OpenBitTorrent’s hosting provider Portlane, ordering it to cease to provide Internet access to the tracker.

Following this decision OpenBitTorrent was pulled offline. TorrentFreak contacted the operators of the site who told us that they would be looking for a new hosting provider to bring back their tracker, so it could continue to coordinate the communications between the millions of people that were using it daily.

Today, we were informed that OpenBitTorrent has finally found a new hosting company, interestingly enough one that is run by a Spanish company. Just hours after the tracker and its website returned, some 20 million peers spread over 200,000 torrents were already connected to the tracker and business continued as usual.

OpenBitTorrent is currently battling for the title of the worlds largest BitTorrent tracker with PublicBitTorrent, another standalone tracker that runs on the Opentracker software. Both trackers handle the communications of between 20 and 30 million BitTorrent users at any given time of the day.

Although it’s good to see that OpenBitTorrent has been resurrected, it’s worth noting that the majority of all BitTorrent users probably never noticed that it had disappeared. Most torrents today come with several backup trackers that are used in case one goes down, and even without trackers at all DHT ensures that downloads continue to work.

Update: Site and tracker seem to be down again, no word on what’s causing the downtime but we assume that it will be resolved quickly.

Source: OpenBitTorrent Tracker Returns After Hollywood Shutdown

This week the pressure became too much and facing huge potential damages and a possible jail sentence for its owner, CB3ROB had to cease providing bandwidth to the site, which effectively shut it down – for a few hours.

In typical Pirate Bay style the site bounced back, supported by controversial hosting provided by the Swedish Pirate Party.

Even though the site was down for a short time, file transfers didn’t stop as those continued to be facilitated by DHT, PEX and the separate OpenBitTorrent (OBT) tracker. Hosted in Sweden, OBT also made the news this week when a court ruled Wednesday that ISP Portlane must hand over the identities of its operators to the movie studios.

Although that decision could be appealed, the OpenBitTorrent site and tracker suddenly went offline in the last 24 hours. It now transpires that the Svea Court of Appeals was busy yesterday, issuing three injunctions on behalf of the studios.

TorrentFreak contacted Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted who provided us with the following information.

Injunction 1

The Court ordered Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg to cease to assist in conducting The Pirate Bay web site consisting of a web site including search engine and database functions on which torrent files may be stored and a tracker.

Injunction 2

The Court ordered Black Internet to cease to provide Internet access to The TPB web site consisting of a web site including search engine and databasefunctions on which torrent files may be stored and a tracker.

Injunction 3

The Court ordered Portlane to cease to provide Internet access to the Tracker with address tracker.openbittorrent.com.

In respect of injunction 1, it’s believed the pair have been banned from not only operating TPB, but any similar site in the future.

It seems reasonable to conclude that it is injunction 3 which took OpenBitTorrent offline yesterday. The site remains down today, with any attempt to contact it being reported as being blocked. TorrentFreak has learned that OpenBitTorrent is currently trying to find a new hosting provider.

Source: Hollywood Lands Triple Strike On Pirate Bay, OpenBitTorrent

Although TeliaSonera may yet appeal the decision and potentially win, today brings news of a new IPRED case on an altogether bigger scale.

Just as The Pirate Bay has relocated and obfuscated its real location to avoid detection, it has also changed its structure and modus operandi in order to stay alive. A major part of this strategy became apparent last year when it shut down its tracker, instead relying on DHT, PEX and trackers operated by 3rd parties, in particular OpenBitTorrent. Hollywood didn’t take long to react.

“OpenBitTorrent is used for file sharing, and we suspect that it is the Pirate Bay tracker with a new name. It is added by default on all of the torrent tracker files on Pirate Bay,” Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted said in an earlier comment.

In November last year Hollywood announced they would sue OpenBitTorrent host Portlane in an attempt to force the closure of the tracker.

In December the Stockholm District Court rejected calls to close down the tracker, a decision that is currently under appeal with the studios claiming that Portlane should take responsibility for the infringements being facilitated by OpenBitTorrent.

While that game of legal-tennis continues, the studios have today won another significant battle, this time in a Stockholm court. While there has been speculation about the identities of those behind OpenBitTorrent, that information has been impossible to verify. All that could be about to change.

“The Court orders Portlane under pain of a fine of SEK 500,000 ($63,633) to provide the Studios with the name and e-mail address information [of those behind OBT],” said movie industry lawyer Monique Wadsted as she provided TorrentFreak with a translation of a decision announced in the Stockholm City Court today.

The ruling covers the customer behind the IP addresses 188.126.64.2 and 188.126.64.3 and/or any other IP addresses in Portlane’s entire range (188.126.64.0 – 188.126.95.255) which have been allocated to tracker.openbittorrent.com since August 28, 2009.

The Court also ruled that Portlane should state whether or not the customer is situated inside the EU. The operators of OBT say they first got together in Lima, Peru, although their nationalities and current locations are unknown.

Portlane has 14 days to hand over the information to the studios but may yet still appeal this decision. At the time of publication Portlane has yet to respond with comments.

OpenBitTorrent has never portrayed the ‘jolly roger’ style of The Pirate Bay and even has a DMCA-style notice and takedown procedure to stop the tracking of torrents. Even so, it would be surprising if they hadn’t anticipated the possibility of a court ruling like this and taken the necessary steps to hide their identities from Portlane.

Source: ISP Must Hand Over Identity Of OpenBitTorrent Operator

Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted, seemingly without any solid proof above mere suspicion, said her clients believe that OBT is simply a re-branded version of the tracker previously operated by The Pirate Bay.

In December 2009, the case went to court. For the studios, the outcome wasn’t good. Even though it was agreed that OpenBitTorrent was being used in some cases to facilitate the distribution of copyright works, the Stockholm District Court rejected calls to force Portlane to close down the site.

The court ruled that Portlane would have to be doing more than just hosting the site in order to be considered guilty of contributing to copyright infringement. The District Court’s decision was interim and the issue is set to be settled fully sometime next summer.

Unsatisfied with this decision, the 13 Hollywood studios who brought the action against Portlane are now taking their case to the Court of Appeal.

The application says that Portlane has not done enough to stop the illicit file-sharing claimed to be facilitated by OpenBitTorrent, so the ISP should take responsibility for the infringements.

Going on to incorporate an interesting sexual analogy, the studios are comparing Portlane with property owners who knowing allow prostitution on their premises without doing anything to stop it.

Just like those that ignore the sex-for-money activities of their tenants, the studios say that by turning a blind eye to activities on OpenBitTorrent, Portlane should be deemed to have encouraged law breaking via the tracker.

Source: Hollywood Appeals Decision Not to Shutdown OpenBitTorrent

OpenBitTorrent is merely a tracker, carries no .torrent files and also operates a full DMCA-style notice and takedown policy. Despite this, during mid-November Hollywood movie studios moved to try and shut down the fledgling service.

However, rather than deal with the tracker’s operators (who we are told offered to co-operate) they instead sued the site’s hosting provider, Portlane.

“OpenBitTorrent is used for file sharing, and we suspect that it is the Pirate Bay tracker with a new name. It is added by default on all of the torrent tracker files on Pirate Bay,” Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted said in a comment.

Even though it was agreed that the tracker could be used to facilitate the distribution of copyright works, the Stockholm District Court has now rejected Hollywood’s request to shut down OpenBitTorrent.

The court ruled that in order for Portlane to be considered as contributing to copyright infringement, it must be guilty of more than just providing Internet access to the site.

“We are happy with the court’s decision. It is indeed the only correct decision. We as an ISP should neither act or get the task to police the Internet,” a Portlane spokesperson told TorrentFreak in a statement.

Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted is disappointed that the court didn’t consider their “suspicions” that OBT is linked to The Pirate Bay.

“The court has not touched on the link between the tracker and The Pirate Bay, and that all the .torrent files on The Pirate Bay include [OBT's] tracker as the default tracker,” she said in a statement, adding: “The day we checked, there were 550,000 works that file-sharers [could download] through the tracker.”

The District Court’s decision is interim and the issue will be settled fully sometime next Summer.

Source: Court Refuses To Order Shutdown of OpenBitTorrent

Even though the sale never went through, OpenBitTorrent has proved its worth recently, since the Pirate Bay tracker had been struggling to stay online. That particular battle formally ended yesterday, with the announcement it had shut down for good.

Unlike most BitTorrent trackers, OpenBitTorrent is not linked to a torrent site where users can download or search for torrents. Indeed, its involvement in the process is very much limited. The tracker is merely assisting in connecting peers with each other based on a hash value, without having any control over, or knowledge of what is being tracked. It also operates a clear DMCA-style takedown policy.

Despite this setup, the Hollywood movie studios have made the decision to try and shut it down by taking the tracker’s hosting company, Portlane, to court.

“OpenBitTorrent is used for file sharing, and we suspect that it is the Pirate Bay tracker with a new name. It is added by default on all of the torrent tracker files on Pirate Bay,” Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted said in a comment. She further noted that the domain of the tracker was originally registered by Fredrik Neij, one of the Pirate Bay founders.

For Portlane, this is not its first experience of a copyright holder demanding the takedown of a BitTorrent site it hosts. Earlier this year, the IFPI asked Portlane to close several BitTorrent sites, which they refused to do. This time around Portlane is not going to comply without a fight either, citing freedom of expression and freedom of information as their defense.

It is indeed questionable if OpenBitTorrent can be held responsible for any copyright infringements that may take place on BitTorrent. Aside from the alleged connection to The Pirate Bay, the site’s assistance in the downloading process is not greater than that of BitTorrent outfits Vuze and uTorrent. Indeed, it could be considered to be less.

Source: Hollywood Takes OpenBitTorrent’s ISP to Court

The Pirate Bay’s prominence has been the Achilles’ heel of BitTorrent. If the tracker should fail today, hundreds of thousands of torrents would begin to slow down significantly or stop working entirely. With the upcoming sale of The Pirate Bay this weakness has become even more salient.

Good and stable alternatives are needed, and luckily some of the leading figures in the BitTorrent community realize this. Last week we already reported on OpenBitTorrent, a free service that is already tracking 1,828,973 torrents for more than 20 million peers.

Still, replacing one tracker with another wont add much redundancy. The founder of BTjunkie and another major torrent sites came to the same conclusion and decided to launch a tracker of their own – PublicBitTorrent. Similar to OBT, PublicBT uses the Beerware licensed Opentracker software.

“Me and others felt that too much of BitTorrent tracking relies on one group and we would like to share some of that responsibility,” BTjunkie’s founder told TorrentFreak. “If anything were to happen to TPB, hundreds of thousands of torrents that are only tracked by TPB could be lost,” he added.

PublicBT has just launched, and although the site was almost entirely copied (without authorization) from the OBT website, it is operated independently. To get the ball rolling all torrents on BTjunkie will soon be updated with the new OBT and PBT trackers, BTjunkie’s founder told TorrentFreak.

Operating a standalone BitTorrent tracker, especially one that tracks millions of peers, can be a costly project but is a prerequisite for the BitTorrent ecosystem. It’s good to see that more BitTorrent site admins stepping up to take responsibility.

Source: PublicBT Tracker Set To Patch BitTorrent’s Achilles’ Heel

Jamie mused: “What if someone was to simply scrape and copy all The Pirate Bay’s torrents over to a new tracker and Mininova and all the other indexes currently using the TPB tracker were to change their listings to point to that? OpenBitTorrent.com for example, an independent open tracker which started recently.”

So today we ask this question – was Jamie’s article incredibly prophetic? Or did it provide the spark, the catalyst, the inspiration needed to bring the BitTorrent community out of its premature misery this week, instead prompting it into positive action rather than self-destruction?

Whatever the truth, whatever the route, today the BitTorrent community has reason for cautious optimism – or possibly a full-scale celebration.

Try this for yourself, don’t take my word for it. First of all find a torrent on The Pirate Bay – I chose Montt Mardie’s “We Are All The Pirate Bay” for symbolic demo purposes here. Now paste the URL of the torrent into the editor on TorrentEditor.com and click ‘edit it’. TorrentEditor will return the seeds and peers – in this case 182 seeds and no peers.

For the next step, remove the Pirate Bay’s trackers from the torrent and replace them with the announce URL for OpenBitTorrent’s tracker, which is http://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce and click ‘update’ at the bottom of the page. Result: 182 seeds, no peers.

I haven’t got time to check all 1,720,650 torrents on Pirate Bay right now but after trying a few, I reached the same result each time. Also, the scrape file of the OpenBitTorrent tracker is exactly the same size of that of The Pirate Bay tracker.

GGF would like you to think that they will control The New Pirate Bay but I believe that accolade is for the community to bestow. So is OBT (c’mon, what’s a tracker without an acronym these days?) the New TPB?

It is if you say it is.

Source: OpenBitTorrent Tracker Muscles In On The Old Pirate Bay