Torrent’Em is not accused of infringement by the entertainment industry, but by Torrentz, a fellow meta-search engine. The site is still online at the moment, but you won’t get any results when you try to do a search.

Flippy, the admin of Torrentz noticed a lot of search requests from the same source over the past few days. He soon discovered that the requests came from Torrent’Em, who simply fetched all data they needed from his site in real-time. So, every time someone search for something on Torrent’Em, he or she actually got a reformatted search result from Torrentz, without attributing the source of the data.

Copyright infringement, nothing more, nothing less. BitTorrent sites use each others data all the time, but not like this of course, since it puts a lot of strain on the Torrentz servers. “If he asked me nicely, I would have prepared a feed for him so he could use that”, Torrentz admin Flippy told TorrentFreak, who accused Torrent’Em of copyright infringement.

Torrent’em didn’t ask anything though, and Flippy had no other option than to block all the proxies Torrent’Em is using. This pretty much takes the whole site out of business, since there are no search results to display anymore.

Carlos, the admin of Torrent’Em was not available to comment, and it is unsure whether his site will be back.

Update: Torrent’Em now links back to Torrentz who lifted the ban. And they lived happily ever after.

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

The site is currently indexing 13 of the most popular BitTorrent sites – mininova.org, thepiratebay.org, mybittorrent.com, fenopy.com, newtorrents.info, seedpeer.com, btmon.com, torrentreactor.com, torrentportal.com, bitTorrent.am, extratorrent.com, monova.org and sumotorrent.com. More sites will be added to the list soon, says Carlos, the developer of Torrent’Em.

Torrent’Em has no ads at the moment, and the user interface looks pretty good. By default the search results are sorted by the number of seeds and peers, which is informative. More detailed information, and direct links to the source, are available when you click on one of the results form the list. “The idea is to have a fast, clean, easy to use website” Carlos told TorrentFreak.

There are also some downsides of course. Links open in a pop-up at the moment, which I find extremely annoying. The site also appears to be a bit slow, but that is mostly because of the “flashy” loading effects. Carlos told TorrentFreak that he’s working on a solution for these, and other problems, he said: “I am working on a settings panel where you can choose how to open the torrent link (self, or blank). Also, in the same panel you will be able to choose the type of animation you want and how fast you want it to be.”

Perhaps there’s even a more serious concern here, not specifically related to this meta-search engine, but to all of them. It seems that more and more sites are moving away from hosting .torrent files, let alone operate a BitTorrent tracker. Most torrents come from 2 or 3 of the bigger sites, and almost 75% of all .torrent files are tracked by The Pirate Bay.

BitTorrent meta-search engines can be really useful, but they are useless if all the sites they index host the same .torrent files. A bit more diversity might be a good idea, especially in the long term.

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