In the three years that followed, What.cd grew beyond all expectations, outgrowing OiNK and establishing itself as the greatest music-sharing torrent site the world has ever known. With Christmas 2010 just around the corner, What.cd reached a somewhat spectacular milestone – the uploading of the site’s one millionth torrent.

While this achievement is the product of the site’s hard-working members, these masses still need to be directed through leadership and a well-designed and run site. At What.cd these essential qualities have been provided from day one by site co-founder and coder extraordinaire, WhatMan. But to the huge disappointment of all who know him, WhatMan’s reign is now over.

“I’ve always been willing to give all of my free time to this site, but as of several months ago, free time has become a luxury of the past. The less time I spend here, the less qualified I am to decide the future of the site and lead it in that direction,” WhatMan explains.

“In these past few months, these duties have been impeccably overtaken by the current management, and I feel entirely comfortable leaving the site in their more than capable hands. It is thus, with great regret, that I have chosen to resign from my long-standing post as sysop of this site.”

WhatMan, who has always conducted himself with grace, went on to give credit to all those staff, past and present, who have helped to make What.cd what it is today. And, like all great leaders, he acknowledged the work of the masses, who contributed hugely to the site’s ecosystem by ripping, uploading and simple downloading.

“I’d love to write more, but this has been hard enough already. If nothing else, I guess, I’d like to be remembered as the badass who coded Ocelot,” WhatMan added.

While the existence of What.cd is a memorable achievement in itself, the creation of the Ocelot tracker software utilized by the site is a milestone which will live on for many years to come. Indeed, Ocelot is one of the most efficient pieces of software of its type available today and the badass who created it will long be remembered, that’s guaranteed.

What.cd remains in safe hands and will continue on seamlessly. Like all good site operators, WhatMan has clearly ensured that everything is running smoothly before announcing his departure.

“It’s been a hell of a ride, What,” he concludes. “I know you’ll do fine without me.”

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

What.CD is now hoping to get back on track by using Flattr, the micropayment site that Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde started.

Below’s a part of the announcement that was posted on the tracker today.

“Being a private torrent site, we don’t technically do anything illegal. However, not everyone agrees with this sentiment – especially, for some reason, payment transaction sites when the IFPI gets involved.

Since August, our donations have been down for much longer than they’ve been up, due mainly to payment providers caving to the demands of the IFPI. As you might imagine, it’s been a nervewracking time for us, and we’ve only been surviving by delving deeper and deeper into our savings.

However, those savings have effectively dried up. Expecting this, we launched a new, solid payment processing system recently – flattr. Unfortunately, flattr is an unfamiliar system to most users, and it can be a bit confusing. As a result, we were not able to make our monthly donation goal in the month that we had flattr running. Thus, we have detailed how to donate via flattr in the following wiki article: How to donate via Flattr”

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

“I felt sick to my stomach all morning,” was how What.CD co-founder ‘WhatMan’ described his reaction on hearing the news. “We plan to grow into a large tracker – probably not as large as OiNK, and not as open, but eventually I would like to support at least a hundred thousand users,” he added.

And so it happened. What.CD was founded and thousands of OiNK refugees soon started to populate the site with tens of thousands of torrents. In the three years that followed, What.CD outgrew its predecessor by a wide margin, which went beyond the expectations of the site’s founders.

“The original plan for What.CD was to be a worthy replacement for OiNK,” WhatMan told TorrentFreak today. “When I was on OiNK, I thought it was perfect – I figured that the community, content, and quality were unbeatable. What.CD was originally a place for OiNK refugees to hide out, and I dreamed of the site one day hosting as much content as OiNK did.”

This dream came true, and today What.CD celebrated the 1 millionth uploaded torrent, a mind boggling number especially for a private BitTorrent tracker. However, the uniqueness of this collection doesn’t just exist in impressive numbers, but in the variety and completeness of the catalogue.

“Nowadays, What.CD tracks over four times as much content as OiNK did at its peak. I’m fairly certain that it’s the largest collection of free music on the internet, and the community helps to keep the content plentiful, of high quality, and exquisitely organized,” WhatMan told us, adding: “If you’re looking for a specific master of an album in a specific format, I would be very surprised if you can’t find it extremely easily on What.CD.”

The site’s userbase is quite different from that of the average BitTorrent tracker, the co-founder told us. What.CD users are audiophiles and music lovers, with musical tastes that are quite distinct from the most downloaded tracks on the majority of BitTorrent sites.

“The What.CD community isn’t a bunch of stereotypical casual pirates who download top 40 songs to put on their ipods. What.CD is comprised mainly of music fanatics – those who really care about their music and its quality – ie. those who think of music not as entertainment, but as art.”

“There aren’t many places for these people to go – legitimate download stores don’t offer our level of quality, and CDs are prohibitively expensive for most audiophiles to build a satisfyingly large collection. So they end up here, and form the backbone of our community.”

In the last three years, What.CD has not only built a million torrent music collection, but the team has also created their own tracker frontend and recently launched its own tracker software. Looking back, WhatMan is proud of what he and his team have accomplished.

“It gives me great pleasure to see other trackers running on our code. By releasing the Gazelle frontend and the Ocelot tracker, our goal was to make it easier for admins to run large sites and for users to download content. When I see the number of successful Gazelle sites, I know that we’ve at least partially succeeded.”

Like any other popular tracker, public or private, What.CD also runs into legal issues with copyright holders. The site has had to relocate to new hosting services due to music industry complaints, and more recently the IFPI has been trying to deprive the site of its income by cutting off the tracker’s donation processing services.

“We do occasionally have legal issues. Our main problem lately has been with donation processing services – every time we get a new method of accepting donations, the IFPI is very fast to send threatening emails to the service and cut off our revenue stream. It’s very difficult to find a payment processing service which will offer us the privacy and protection we need.”

The What.CD team understands that is is impossible for the site is to fly under the radar, which it never did. However, they are confident that these issues can be dealt with and that they can focus on improving the functionality of the site to keep the community and site thriving.

“Needless to say, we plan on continuing to survive – we’ve worked too long and too hard to lose the site now. I’d also like the site to expand to contain music from non-English speaking cultures, and become a haven for audiophiles from all corners of the globe,” WhatMan told TorrentFreak.

What.CD, it seems, is here to stay.

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

What.cd first appeared online in the fall of 2007, just days after the demise of the largest music tracker at the time, OiNK. The site’s founders felt that the OiNK refugees deserved a new home, and decided to fill the void the Pink Palace had left. In the three years that followed, What.cd outgrew its predecessor by a wide margin and slowly turned into a legend itself.

Today, the tracker receives an average of 3,500 hits per second, which is a demanding task for the site’s hardware and software. Up until a few weeks ago What.cd used the XBTT backend, which handled the traffic really well in the early years, but as the site grew problems started to appear more frequently.

To customize the XBTT backend to the needs of the growing site, back in the winter of 2007 What’s developers delved deep into the core of the code. Some adjustments were made, but at the same time the developers realized that XBTT’s code wasn’t perfect. Perhaps just as importantly, it was not something of their own.

What.cd needed its own tracker backend, so just as they had replaced the original TBDev source with their own Gazelle code, XBTT needed to have a successor.

The story that unfolded after the What team decided to build their own tracker is a unique saga. A long and winding development process of nearly three years eventually resulted in the ‘Ocelot’ tracker that went live on What.cd a few weeks ago. Not without result.

Today, What.cd has one of, if not the most efficient and lightweight tracker there is. On What.cd Ocelot uses only 20%-30% of one CPU core and 3GB of RAM, compared to the four instances of XBTT that were using up 50%-100% CPU before. In the future the tracker’s code will be open sources so other BitTorrent communities can benefit from it as well.

To document this milestone the What.cd has written a long article on how Ocelot was born, what decisions were made along the way, and why it took so much time to complete. A great read for those who are interested in learning more background information on one of the largest private BitTorrent communities that exists today.

The complete story behind Ocelot, as posted on What.cd by the site’s staff, can be read below.

Ocelot: The story of a tracker

What.CD is a private tracker. Thus, the entire site, staff, and community all revolve around a common piece of software – the tracker backend. Complementing the site frontend, which you’re looking at now, the tracker itself handles connections between peers.

With over five million peers, our tracker receives an average of 3,500 hits per second, although after a period of tracker downtime, load can spike up to past 12,000 hits per second. This means that, when your client announces, the tracker has 80 microseconds to search through its database of over 900,000 torrents and 5,000,000 peers, compute a response, and send it back to you. That’s a lot of stress on a piece of software!

We anticipated this problem, of course, back before the site even started. That’s why we elected to use what was then the fastest private tracker backend in the world – XBTT.

Lauded for its speed, XBTT handled the peers very well for the first few months of the site’s existence. We brought on a developer – asm – whose job was to tune it and modify it as needed, and he was able to do that just fine – for a few months. However, asm was reluctant to make any major changes. When we asked why, his response was that XBTT’s code was too weird, and that he was afraid he’d break something.

A bit surprised, we lead site developers peered into the bowels of XBTT for the first time, and we found that he was correct. XBTT’s internal code worked fine in practice, but strange/outdated design decisions and the inclusion of thousands of lines of unnecessary code gave us worries about how well it would scale to a swarm of the size we had planned, as well as whether we’d be able to continue modifying it to our needs.

So a plan was formed. We would create a tracker of our own.

Late winter 2007

It made perfect sense. We were already replacing the outdated TBDev source with our own new Gazelle source, so why not replace XBTT with another piece of software as well? Make it fast, make the code pretty, give it a cool-sounding exotic animal name, and we’d be set. It couldn’t possibly take very long – trackers are very simple pieces of software, after all. The only problem was that XBTT had scared asm into hiding, the other developers were all php developers (php is a language that is fast to write and slow to run) and we wanted the tracker coded in C++ (slow to write, fast to run). The solution was thus to outsource.

January 2008

Our first developer choice was a young developer called rootkit. Immensely intelligent, but perhaps not the greatest people person in the world, rootkit decided that he wanted to write the tracker in haskell instead. We weren’t too excited to have the tracker written in a weird language that no one understood, but he promised that it’d be fast so we let him go at it. We don’t think he ever wrote more than a hundred lines of it before he gave up and stepped down.

While we searched for a new developer, WhatMan decided to try an experiment – to see if a php tracker could outperform XBTT. He hacked away for a weekend and created Lioness – a beautiful little tracker, no doubt one of the fastest php trackers ever made. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite fast enough for our needs – upon testing, the swarm crushed our poor webserver, and we were forced to go back to XBTT.

By this time, XBTT was barely able to keep up with the load. The timeouts had already started, and we did whatever we could, but in the end, the only thing that really helped was when we moved to our new (then) ridiculously oversized server in Canada.

March – May 2008

Another developer had been found! The guy was smart, mature, well educated, fluent in C++, and seemingly very able. We told him what we needed, and he started coding. A month later, the new dev – lenrek – had created the first tracker to call itself Ocelot.

lenrek’s ocelot looked promising. It was new, shiny, and multithreaded. We figured that our problems were solved, but when we tried it out, it exploded. It is still unclear exactly why, just that it happened. That ocelot was tweaked and some more tests were run, but we eventually gave up. lenrek’s ocelot was basically shelved, and attention turned, for the next year, back to making XBTT handle its load properly.

Fortunately for us, lenrek stayed on as a developer – although his ocelot didn’t succeed, he’s responsible in a large part for making the site work as well as it does today.

June 2009 – February 2010

In the next year of stagnation, ocelot was never quite forgotten, but working on it was never very motivating – especially with only one tracker dev. So we raised the XBTT announce interval from 30 minutes to 35, then to 40, then to 45. In the meantime, the idea of ocelot waited until we found someone to revitalize it. In June 2009, FZeroX found such a person – rconan.

rconan was incredibly intelligent, and came up with a plan for what everyone was pretty sure was going to be the most awesome tracker ever. High performance event queues, hashmaps, all that cool stuff. We outsourced the project to him, he started coding, and initial progress was very rapid.

Two hundred changes and additions to rconan’s new ocelot were made between the months of August and October. Before we knew it, the new ocelot was all but finished – 4,000 lines of divine C++ code, with just “a few” bugs and features left to code. And then, rconan’s real life started to get busier.

A couple of changes were made in November, a couple in December, one in January, and a final flurry of activity took place in February. When we asked for progress updates, ocelot was still a few bugfixes and features away from being ready for production, but no changes were ever made after February. As none of our in-house developers had been closely following the development of the new ocelot, we were unable to take over, and simply hoped that rconan’s real-life obligations would clear up and he’d have the time to finish it.

In the meantime, we had raised XBTT’s announce interval to the highest point we could justify – 47 minutes – and it was still timing out so often it became a joke. In April 2010, we gave it its own server and started load balancing multiple instances of it – starting out with 2 XBTTs, and then 3, and then 4. This gave us some breathing room, but not for long.

April – May 2010

At one point, A9 and oorza were arguing about java performance. A9 had the brilliant idea of daring oorza to write a high performance tracker in java, and work began on shadowolf. oorza proclaimed shadowolf “almost completely done” on May 12th, save a few outstanding bugs. We checked in on his progress at the end of August, and he was rewriting the entire plugin architecture, and considering using hadoop to store peers. We’re unsure about shadowolf’s current status.

August-September 2010

No updates had been made to ocelot in eight months, and rconan was nowhere to be found. The future of shadowolf was unclear. When a thread came up about ocelot in the forums, the staff were forced to admit that development on it had ceased, and that no update was liable to take place in the near future. It was a hard post to write, considering how the timeouts had become so bad that the joke wasn’t funny anymore. Users would sometimes have to wait hours for the tracker to let them download things, stats were being lost left and right, and we were out of hardware to throw at the problem. Something had to be done.

Enter WhatMan. Having previously stayed out of the C++ tracker development arena due to a lack of confidence with his high-performance C++ coding skills, WhatMan was confused with as to why everyone was creating 4000+ line of code behemoths when trackers are, in reality, extremely simple pieces of software. So he lifted some key design choices from rconan’s ocelot, created the rest of the design himself, and spent the last week of August hacking away at a brand new ocelot.

On September 1st, ocelot was ready for performance testing. We replaced one xbtt instance with it, and it scaled. So we replaced two, and it scaled. We tweaked it a bit, and then replaced the third and fourth instances, tweaked it a bit more, and replaced the load balancer. What four XBTT instances and a load balancer were failing to handle before, was now being handled by one, singlethreaded instance of the latest ocelot.

Then we pushed it harder – we lowered the announce interval to 40 minutes, and then to 30, and it scaled. Then we lowered it to 20 minutes, and linux broke before ocelot did. It was beautiful.

The dev team rejoiced, and banded together to add the remaining features and fix the remaining bugs. By September 3rd, ocelot was considered feature complete, and we let it run the entire swarm – one tracker for five million peers, at a 30 minute announce interval.

September 2010 – Now

Since then, ocelot’s been purring along. It uses up 20%-30% of one CPU core, and 3GB of RAM – for comparison, our four XBTT instances used the same amount of RAM in total, and 50%-100% of a core each. It’s 1547 lines of code long in total, which will be open-sourced at some point. The dev team has added the occasional bugfix, and there may be some bugs yet to be discovered, but our tracker is now more stable than it’s been since we started. After over two and a half years, ocelot’s journey to creation is finally finished.

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

“They must capture important evidence on a computer at the scene of an investigation before it is powered down and removed for later analysis. ‘Live’ evidence, such as active system processes and network data, is volatile and may be lost in the process of turning off a computer. How does an officer on the scene effectively do this if he or she is not a trained computer forensics expert?”

Using COFEE, of course.

The Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE) is a piece of software designed for the use of law enforcement agencies, and provided to the same free of charge by Microsoft. And, largely because of its mystique, has been a much sought-after piece of code.

Indeed, on the private tracker What.cd, users had offered a huge bounty (a reward for finding and sharing something) of 1.6 terabytes.

During the last day or so, a user – who had only been a member for a matter of weeks – uploaded COFEE.

However, What.cd then took the unusual step of removing the torrent. Not just an unusual step but, in my opinion, a very sensible step indeed.

“Suddenly, we were forced to take a real look at the program, its source, and the potential impact on the site and security of our users and staff,” said What.cd management in a statement.

“And when we did, we didn’t like what came of it. So, a decision was made. The torrent was removed (and it is not to be uploaded here again),” they added.

According to the site’s staff, neither them or their host was threatened by Microsoft or law enforcement. The decision was taken purely on the issue of site and member security.

Of course, the tool is now widely available from other sources and while some are saying that the tool is useless to regular Internet users, there are others who disagree. It certainly won’t take long for a detailed analysis to appear.

There will doubtless be lots of finger-wagging and complaints that this tool has become available in this way, but as with unexpected leaks of anything from software, to movies, to music, rarely is the finger pointed at the initial supplier of the material. That is usually way too embarrassing to reveal.

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

By sheer volume the number of downloads these lesser known bands accumulate might only be a fraction of those generated by the Britney Spears and Duffys of this world, but 10,000 downloads is pretty significant for developing artists. Artists need to be heard in order to build a steady fanbase.

Revenue wise, most artists trying to earn a living making music only have a moderate income, and every fan counts. Generally, they don’t make much from album sales – contracts where the band/artist gets less than 10% of the revenue are quite common. Merchandising and playing gigs are the largest source of income, income that is generated by fans.

If the average artist can pick up a few hundred extra fans by giving away his music for free, this can make a huge difference. This group might not be that interesting for the record labels and the royalty collectors, who tend to feed off the top 1% of artists who are generally well marketed by million dollar budgets from the music industry.

Contrary to the conclusions of the PRS study, a special brand of ‘pirates’ are particularly interested in new and unsigned bands. On the music tracker What.cd, which hosts almost 100,000 users, the most downloaded album ever is a compilation of unsigned artists. Second is an album from The Flashbulb, with 10 times as many downloads as Britney Spears’ Greatest Hits collection.

Similarly, on the music sharing website Jamendo thousands of artists are giving away their music for free. Rob Costlow, one of the early adopters of the site told TorrentFreak that thanks to this free music model, he is able to make a living off his passion. His most popular album on Jamendo was downloaded over 80,000 times while nearly half a million listened to it on the website.

So, even though the vast majority of the the users of file-sharing services download music from the top of the charts, there is undoubtedly a huge potential for new artists to market themselves through file-sharing. Perhaps less interesting for the major labels who make most money off cleverly marketed top acts, but extremely valuable for the average artist trying to make a living off music.

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

“Open Your Eyes Records and What.cd are collaborating to revolutionize the industry landscape by making it clear that P2P technology and record labels can work hand-in-hand to accomplish their ultimate goals: getting artists heard and growing their fan bases,” reads the announcement at the BitTorrent tracker.

Open Your Eyes Records will exclusively distribute new releases on the BitTorrent tracker, and it will keep the filesharing community up to date on the latest news. With only one signed artist at the label, the collaboration wont add much to the existing library of nearly 100,000 artists available via the What.cd tracker. However, it sends out a strong message that confirms the current trend that BitTorrent is much more than just a tool for pirates.

There is a whole new generation of music enthusiasts that have grown up with file-sharing. It is part of the music industry now, and it exposes people to more music than they would ever hear on mainstream radio. This is probably not what the RIAA wants to hear, or will ever admit, but music is more popular than ever, with notable thanks to file-sharing. BitTorrent has the power to promote artists based on their music, not on the strength and scope of their advertising budget.

This year, thousands of artists have realized that giving away their music for free can actually help them to create a larger fanbase, but it is difficult to deny that filesharing makes it harder for record labels to hype mediocre content. However, music itself is more alive than ever before.

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

A whole new generation of artists, most of who grew up with Napster, Limewire and BitTorrent, are starting to utilize the power of filesharing networks. This year alone, thousands of albums were released online for free, and this number is growing at an increasing rate. The possibilities are endless. Some artists use sites like Jamendo, others go for mainstream BitTorrent sites like The Pirate Bay and Mininova, and yet another group prefers niche BitTorrent communities such as What.cd.

On What.cd, one of the larger music communities with over 60,000 members, artists have found a particularly successful outlet. In fact, the free albums are particularly popular, and often among the most downloaded. The music minded members, of which quite a few are artists themselves, are very appreciative of every new album. This August a compilation CD was released with tracks from 19 artists who uploaded their music to the site. This CD, titled “The What CD” is the most active torrent of all time on the tracker.

At TorrentFreak we have now reached a point where we can no longer mention all the artists that give away their music for free. While it was a rather exceptional thing to do three years ago, it has become mainstream today. It is, however, worth talking to one of these new generation of bands and artists who decide to share their music at no cost.

The Pragmatic is such a band. Today, the 5 member band, which was founded in 2006, has released the album ‘Circles’ on BitTorrent and Rapidshare. André, one of the band members, who plays an analog synthesizer from the early 80s, explained to us why they chose to give away their music for free.

“With this first release we really wanted to try out giving it out for free and just see what happens,” he said. “Bands like Radiohead and NIN come out and release stuff for free and have success, but that’s largely because of their already established careers. They’ve built that up the traditional way and they’ve reaped the rewards of that, but their success in file-sharing is more of a perk of that status.”

“Growing up, every musician dreamed of that big shiny record deal, but I don’t think it’s relevant anymore. Labels have had to sober up and re-think what their roles are. It used to be about music, and I think file-sharing has brought that to their attention. By releasing it for free, I guess we could be losing money, but in the long run I think we’re (hopefully) making fans.”

Similar to most other people, André is part of a generation that grew up with file-sharing. It is part of the music industry now, and it exposes people to more music than they would ever hear on mainstream radio. It is probably not what the RIAA wants to hear, or will ever admit, but music is more popular than ever thanks to file-sharing. André agrees, and told TorrentFreak:

“Fans go to shows, buy merch and support bands for all the right reasons. I think that our generation grew up with an almost insatiable need for more and more music. I know I did. I’ve downloaded lots of albums I loved and bought physical versions. I’ve downloaded plenty of albums I hated and deleted. I can’t begin to count how many bands I know and love because of Napster/Soulseek/Bittorrent. File-sharing was never really about stealing music, it was about finding music you loved.”

“Labels will complain and sue their very core audience just to make a dollar. I can’t blame them, it’s the way they’ve built their company. Change scares them, especially when they don’t control it. I honestly believe that I wouldn’t be a musician today if Napster hadn’t appeared. I think Napster fostered the incredible current musical culture and nobody gives them credit for it. I find it very hard for an upcoming artist to get any exposure without being willing to promote their music on p2p networks.”

The clash between artist and labels, and the ever increasing piracy statistics are forcing the big labels to rethink their business models. Nowadays, BitTorrent has the power to promote artists based on their music, not on the advertising budget. It is hard to deny that the music labels are in a crisis, however, music itself is more alive than ever before.

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

Yes, all those nay-sayers and early fans that have populated the comment sections of our previous stories on Gazelle can finally prove the exploits and bad coding that they’ve been claiming, as the first public release candidate of the script is now available for download.

Reactions from those that have given the site a try, have been mostly positive. The main negative comments stem from the fact it’s not an intuitive install. Part of that comes from the memory caching software , memcached , which gives the project its ‘blazing speed’. Also, right now the system uses XBTT as a tracker, but we’re told that it will have its own (multithreaded) tracker ready for later versions, codenamed ‘Ocelot’.

Also, as things stand, while they hoped for around a doubling of capacity over the older TBsource script, in practice it’s become more like double that, meaning a 10,000 user site under TBSource can probably handle 40,000 without any major difference in site response or system load. Project head WhatMan told TorrentFreak: “We out-shot our initial projections by a very wide margin.”

Interest in Project Gazelle has been fairly strong, and at least half a dozen sites are now running the new script. Perhaps more interestingly, though, is that Gazelle isn’t JUST a torrent site. Due to its modular nature, it can be used for regular sites as well. It’s a bit like a content management system in that respect, and perhaps our earlier comparison to Diferior wasn’t all that far from the mark.

If you’re interested in getting your hands on the Gazelle code, then just head over to the project site and follow the instructions. The whole kit-and-caboodle is released under a modified version of the GPL, so have fun.

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.