After being initially hosted in the Netherlands, the site moved to Canada to escape BREIN’s jurisdiction, but it later returned as a client of hosting provider XS Networks.

Having won cases against other torrent site hosters in the past, the anti-piracy group was quick to ask XS Networks to shut SumoTorrent down and hand over the personal details of its owner. XS Networks refused, however, and said it would only respond to a court order.

The provider and SumoTorrent eventually agreed to voluntarily hand over some personal details, but not before the torrent site had moved to a new host in the Ukraine. To make matters worse for BREIN, the personal details on record at the hosting provider turned out to be false.

So SumoTorrent “escaped” again.

According to BREIN the Dutch hosting provider was to blame for this outcome, and in response went on to sue the company earlier this year in pursuit of damages. BREIN argued that XS Networks acted negligently when it refused to take the site down when asked to do so.

Today the Court of The Hague handed down its verdict in which it sides with BREIN.

The Court ruled that SumoTorrent is clearly facilitating copyright infringement and states that XS Networks should have taken the site offline when BREIN asked them to.

“The unlawful characteristics of the (activities on) SumoTorrent were evident. Moreover they were obvious to XS Networks, or should have been obvious to XS Networks,” the verdict reads.

By keeping the site online, the Court adds, the provider acted unlawfully against the interests of copyright holders represented by BREIN.

Aside from thousands of euros in legal costs, the provider must now pay damages for the infringing content that was shared via SumoTorrent. How much XS Networks will have to pay is yet to be determined.

The Court also ordered XS Networks to hand over all personal information they have on the operator of SumoTorrent or pay a penalty of 10,000 euros a day.

The ruling is a crucial one concerning the liability of hosting providers for websites that are operated by their customers. According to the verdict groups representing copyright holders can demand websites be taken offline, and it’s then up to the provider to determine whether this request is legitimate.

In other words, providers themselves have to determine whether a site is facilitating copyright infringement, as opposed to the court.

With this ruling in hand BREIN can ask for the shutdown of any site they deem to be infringing, as well asking for the personal details of the site owner. Providers who refuse to cooperate will make themselves liable for damages caused by the website in question.

A dangerous precedent, both from privacy and censorship perspectives.

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

They specifically demand that the Moxie Colo stops hosting top ranked torrent sites What.cd, SumoTorrent, BTMon and FullDls. Generally, the CRIA is demanding that Moxie stop hosting all torrent sites.

TorrentFreak has been reporting recently on the plight of QuebecTorrent which is currently tied up in a legal battle against the music industry in Canada. Clearly that – and the running out of town of Demonoid – was just a run up to further action by an emboldened CRIA.

In files served on Moxie Communications Inc (the parent company of Moxie Colo), the CRIA is demanding that Moxie turn over the personal details of the torrent site administrators, presumably so they can go after them. The CRIA also want Moxie to turn over all relevant site logs, but it is at least unlikely that the Canadian police will be interested in most of the users.

Of course, just because the CRIA demands something, doesn’t mean they will get it. For now, Moxie Colo said it won’t be giving in to the CRIA’s demands.

Sean Corbin, CEO of Moxie Communications told TorrentFreak: “We will not be following the request and will be fighting for the rights of our clients as to date laws in Canada protect them. We have looked into the matter and from what we understand these sites are not breaking any laws in Canada. If we do not comply they might bring legal action against Moxie Communications, as they believe without us these sites could not do what they do so therefore we are as bad as they are.”

More on this breaking story as we get it.

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

This is pretty exceptional if you take into account that the site only had a dozen visitors 6 months ago when it just started.

We are glad that the administrator of SUMOtorrent agreed to answer some of our questions, so we can learn a bit more about his success story.

TorrentFreak: How many visitors does SUMOTorrent have at the moment?

SUMO: SUMOTorrent is now getting about 350 000 daily unique visitors, while SUMOTracker is now tracking 2 million peers, and is probably the largest public BitTorrent tracker hosted on a single server! We recently launched a second public tracker that we hope will be used as much by BitTorrent users as the main tracker.

TorrentFreak: What did you do to grow this fast?

SUMO: I believe the reason why we grew so fast is experience, ideas and support of countless people!

TorrentFreak: So, with all the traffic you’re getting you must be driving a really expensive sports car now right?

SUMO: I don’t have a car but I advise you all to drive safely, put your safety belt on and respect speed limits.

Many webmasters do not communicate about money and torrents. Truth is that, just like any other popular site with high traffic, torrents sites make an income with 4 zeros, SUMOTorrent included. However, we’re not rich: at the end of the month, with all our expenses (hosting of 6 servers for SUMOTorrent/SUMOTracker), developers, partners, backup servers, services… we have actually just enough cash to purchase new servers next month. Our partners could tell you that we often ask them for a delay to pay them every month :p

We also support various sites and donate to them when we have some extra cash (Filesoup, IndianMP3 …)

TorrentFreak: Are you running the site on your own or do you have a team of moderators helping you out?

SUMO: We are running the site on our own and looking for moderators to help us removing the spam and fake torrents that get through our filters.

TorrentFreak: SUMOTorrent is one of the few BitTorrent sites that has their own tracker, do you think we need more public BitTorrent trackers?

SUMO: Of course we do need more public BitTorrent trackers! Many BitTorrent sites do not have their own tracker, and will tell you that it is to avoid legal troubles. I believe this is only an excuse. When you come to think about it, a public BitTorrent tracker generates a lot of traffic that cannot be monetized as it is not seen by anybody. SUMOTracker costs about $500 per month and we feel like this money is well spent as we are doing it for the community!

TorrentFreak: The Pirate Bay announced that they are working on a new BitTorrent protocol, what is your take on this?

SUMO: I have quite bad memories of the Suprnova/Exeem project, but I believe the SecureP2P project launched by PirateBay will be a great improvement to BitTorrent as it is based on experience of what is not working good in the current protocol and trying to improve it. They have received dozens of suggestions from users all around the world, and I wish the best to them in this enterprise.

We have contacted the head of this project and will provide them with any resources they might need to achieve it. SUMOTorrent will of course support the new protocol, promote it to our users and provide additional trackers on SUMOTracker for the new tracker protocol.

TorrentFreak: Can you tell us something about features you want to add to SUMOTorrent in the future?

SUMO: We will add more languages and buy new servers to scale site architecture with our growth. We will also work on content partnerships, and invite any filmmaker, music group or artist who is interested in sponsoring of his production and free distribution of his content through our site to contact us.

Just like PirateBay and Mininova, we would like to promote groups and help artists getting known through the power of peer-to-peer!

TorrentFreak: Do you have a message for all the anti-piracy organizations out there?

SUMO: Yes, take a look at the 100 first sites according to Alexa ranking! P2P and BitTorrent websites are here to stay, and they are the major means of online content distribution nowadays. This is a fact. Instead of trying to block the highway that leads to your customers, you should put your strategy into question. When the time will come that P2P sites will get better organized (and this time is soon, you know it) and ran by smart structures instead of simple individuals, you will understand you have missed the last opportunity you had to jump on the bandwagon of the digital revolution!

Meanwhile for all torrent users, we are happy to give you a free drive to where you want on www.sumotorrent.com :)

TorrentFreak: Thanks SUMO and good luck in the future!

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

If you’re looking for high speed downloads, a free Usenet trial might be a good alternative.

1. thepiratebay.org

peers: 5.164.500
torrents: 636.734

2. demonoid.com

peers: 3.138.042 (estimated)
torrents: *no info*

3. denis.stalker.h3q.com

peers: 1.353.421
torrents: 195.586

4. sumotracker.org

peers: 1.256.358
torrents: 130.693

5. torrentbox.com

peers: 1.144.100
torrents: 40.818

The Pirate Bay and Demonoid take up the first two spots, and it has been like that for over a year. The three remaining sites in the list are perhaps not that well known to the general public, even though most of us use their trackers nearly every day.

One of the least familiar sites from this list is probably SUMOtracker. It’s pretty impressive that they made it into the top 5, especially as the tracker has only been running for a few months. We took this opportunity to ask the administrator of SUMOtracker and SUMOtorrent some questions to find out what drives someone to keep a project like this running.

Sumo: The SUMOtorrent team members have been involved into the BitTorrent community since the very beginning, and we noticed that there was really few public BitTorrent trackers nowadays, affiliated to an indexer or not. After Mongo56 and BitTorrent-Support closed, there was only Pirate Bay’s tracker remaining out there. Our team initially started the SUMOtorrent project to fill this gap and developed an open source BitTorrent tracker: SUMOtracker. While it was still in development, we decided to launch SUMOtracker with a PHP tracker, which then evolved into a C++ tracker to support today more than 1.2 million peers.

TorrentFreak: What kind of hardware keeps SUMOtracker and SUMOtorrent in the air?

SUMO: SUMOtorrent and SUMOtracker are running on 5 servers at the moment:

- SUMOtracker is running onto a dual-core 3.2 Ghz with 2GB of RAM, 10 mbits/s dedicated line
- SUMOtorrent is running on 4 servers:

We will scale the architecture for both sites everytime is required, and our next scheduled upgrades include a second server for SUMOtracker and front-ends and dedicated servers for the new services, such as torrent mail alerts

TorrentFreak: SUMOtracker tracks over a million peers already. How did you manage to grow this fast?

SUMO: We were very surprised to see that our tracker reached such a high number of peers this fast! In part this is because of our good relationships with other BitTorrent websites. The tracker started growing very fast after some very popular sites, Mininova for example, recommended us as a reliable public tracker. Then, about 2 months ago, we decided to go even further by adding SUMOTracker as a backup tracker (i.e. by adding it to the announce-list of torrents) for all public .torrent files, so when the original tracker is out of service, users could still use the torrents.

TorrentFreak: Do you think you can ever outgrow the untouchable Pirate Bay? Or do you have a different agenda?

SUMO: I don’t think so, for a very simple reason: SUMOtracker is not a site that intends to compete with other BitTorrent trackers. The site and the tracker are just our contribution to the community! Hence, our purpose is absolutely not to make SUMOtracker outgrow other trackers, but to work with other webmasters to make the BitTorrent network stronger. A concrete example of our way of thinking: SUMOTorrent not only adds SUMOTracker, but also other public trackers like Pirate Bay to the announce-list. So any torrent with SUMOTracker as backup also has Pirate Bay as a backup tracker.

We also shared the source code for this feature to other BitTorrent sites. Monova.org or FullDls.com for example, are using a similar method! And if there are new public BitTorrent site starting, we will also support them and integrate them!

TorrentFreak: Does SUMOTorrent have any features that other BitTorrent sites don’t have?

SUMO: We freshly launched a new service that I believe to be unique as of today: torrents mail alerts. Without any registration, users can simply put their email address in a box and they will receive by email an alert by email when new torrents are available for their search keyword. We believe it will be useful to users, more than RSS2 or search RSS as not everybody has a RSS client, while everybody has an email address!

TorrentFreak: Can you reveal something about new features and or improvements you are working on at the moment?

SUMO: Yes sure! I think the next big evolution of SUMOtorrent will be the multilingual version. Some other cool features we are working are related to the user experience.
We are also working on core features: even stronger protections to fight against spam and fake torrents, improving the quality of results, the speed of the site…

TorrentFreak: Sounds great, anything to add?

SUMO: Since we started, SUMOtorrent has always been dedicated to the community. We partnered with FileSoup.co.uk and we are working closely with several webmasters, which are “good friends”: Mininova, Fenopy, FullDls, myBittorrent, Bitoogle, Yotoshi, Monova, … We are part of that group of sites that really focus on the user, and we will continue with our current means to provide the best service to users!

TorrentFreak: Good luck with the tracker and the site, we could use more initiatives like this.

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

The owner of SumoTorrent told TorrentFreak that he discovered that A search on Google for sumotorrent now triggers the following message at the bottom of the results page:

“In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.”

A search for other BitTorrent sites like Torrentspy and Torrentreactor comes up with the same message (note. the sites are still indexed but some results are removed). Strangely enough, for torrentreactor it only shows up for a search on the .com domain.

According to Google the filtered search results are caused by DMCA complaints , but the owner of SumoTorrent is a little surprised by this. He has no clue why the “content owner” didn’t contact him directly because he generally processes takedown notices within 24 hours. Unfortunately the link Google provides to the complaint in question doesn’t work, and a search on ChillingEffects.org doesn’t really help much either.

One of the few BitTorrent related DMCA complaints Google received concerned Paris Hilton’s famous . This notice was sent by Jim Salomon, the brother of Rick Salomon who used to date Paris. The complaint is hilarious, Jim even complains why it takes Google more than 4 hours to remove the .torrent in question. Funny or not, eventually Google decided to remove the .torrent file in question from their search results.

What Google has done isn’t really that revolutionary because most administrators of BitTorrent sites take down torrent files themselves upon request. However, the main reason for this is that they don’t want endless legal battles. They see it as a service to the content owners to remove the .torrent files if a decent request is made. But I kind of hoped that Google would make a stand here, wishful thinking so it seems.So what do you think? Should Google filter their results like this?

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