In the dying days of November 2009, a shockwave rippled through the private BitTorrent tracker community. One of the scene’s most successful sites, SceneTorrents, was shutting down for good, with the site’s operators citing “legal issues”. Now, 18 months later, here is the full story of raids and arrests, followed up by an all-too-familiar deafening silence.
In a week where BitTorrent already lost its largest torrent indexer Mininova, a well-known private tracker has also announced that it will cease its operations. Rumors that the shutdown is related to the bust of the topsite LOOP earlier this week remain unconfirmed.
Since the birth of restrictions, there’s always been someone ready to set-free. BitTorrent set media free and then for a multitude of reasons, private torrent trackers restricted it. It appears that a group of people have published a method to allow non-members to leech private trackers for free. But at what cost?
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Left Quote“The Pirate Bay has been one of the most important movements in Sweden for freedom of speech, working against corruption and censorship.
Peter Sunde Left Quote
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