BitTorrent Sites Safe Haven Under Threat
Written by Ernesto on June 23, 2007Leaseweb, the ISP of some of the largest BitTorrent sites like Torrentspy, BTjunkie and Demonoid was forced to take down everlasting.nu, a relatively small BitTorrent site. The outcome of the lawsuit initiated by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit Brein could spell trouble for some of the key players in the BitTorrent landscape.
In response to this decision (Dutch link) several BitTorrent admins, who prefer not to be named, already announced that they have plans to leave Leaseweb. Others are setting up backup locations in case their site s are targeted. An admin of one of the bigger BitTorrent sites said:
“It looks like we’re not going to be very safe anymore on Leaseweb, we are putting backups in place on another location, just in case.”
This Thursday, the Amsterdam court concluded that everlasting.nu structurally facilitated copyright infringement by allowing their users to download copyrighted content via torrents hosted on their site.
Leaseweb’s lawyers argued that there was no evidence that these torrents really pointed to copyrighted works. They referred to the fact that rights holders often upload fake files themselves and that the name of a .torrent file is not sufficient to prove that copyrighted works are being distributed. Brein responded to this argument by stating that everlasting.nu then would be a very customer unfriendly BitTorrent site if this was the case, and the judge agreed with this.
At the end of the hearing the court decided that Leaseweb has to take down everlasting.nu and hand over the name and address of the owner. Additionally, Leaseweb is obliged to take down everlasting.nu, in case the site returns in the near future.
It still remains unclear what made the judge decide that everlasting is facilitating copyright infringement and how this will affect the position of all the other BitTorrent sites hosted by Leaseweb. The fact that everlasting has their own BitTorrent tracker was not used as an argument in the decision. So does this mean that hosting .torrent files is illegal now?
Brein sure thinks so, they already announced another lawsuit against Leaseweb to take down another BitTorrent site. At this point it is not sure whether this is one of the big players like Torrentspy, BTjunkie and Demonoid, or yet again a smaller BitTorrent site.
To be continued.
Previously: Mac OS X Leopard Leaked to BitTorrent
Next: FlixFlux: BitTorrent Site Includes Movie Trailers
76 Responses
Pages: « 1 [2] 3 4 » Show All
As of June 25th, 2007 Demonoid’s website servers have gone offline. Though Demonoid’s torrent tracker still active, but it is unsure if any torrents are still registered with the tracker. This seems to be in response to Leaseweb’s termination of everlasting.nu, and the pending legal implications. Read more @ Torrent Sites safe haven under threat - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonoid_%28BitTorrent%29
I R SAD
so demonoid is no longer a website??
I am just coming from Demonoid’s IRC channel.
Here is what they have written at the top of the channel :
“Demonoid.com Site offline for a few days while harddrives get replaced”
Figure ?
Anyways check it out yourselves :
Server : irc.p2p-network.net
Channel: #demonoid
Hope this helps.
Long Live Demon.
Thanks for the update. That’s sad. I hope we hear from demonoius if they will soon have a new home. IRC anyone?
To Brein and the unnamed shill judge, may pox beset your genitals and they be painful and sore.
I thik its Deimos ? I am at IRC @ my nick is asdzx
Hate Brein.
By the way jackson , come @ demonoid channel, we can discuss and flame BREIN their at our heart’s content! :P
And I agree with your sentiments !!
Thanks for the update! I thought that I was going crazy - I thought that my ISP blocked me too, because I go to Demonoid at least once a day.
http://torrentfreak.com/demonoid-offline-for-a-few-days/
F**k. I was almost done getting Halo 2 fully working on XP too! *sigh*
At last!! I find a friggin’ reference to this demonoid problem somewhere!
Amazing that with google news and all the rest of it, nowhere could I find anything about why demonoid was not responding. Until I thought to check my rss feeds and then saw this! OOPS. Hehe.
I would have thought it would be a leading story just by the fact that a lot of blogs would carry it but now..nothing.
Twats.
anyway I also thought my ISP had blocked me. I did the pings and saw the tracker was responding so I had to conclude that my ISP had blocked demonoid on port 80 or HTTP or something.
So while I am sort of glad to find out the truth, it hurts.
My favourite site…surely this cannot happen.
Can it?
Peace be with you Demon Lord! :-)
Justanobody: Yeah, my sympathies. TorrentFreaks is the only site to carry news of this. I googled and checked news and found nothing.
Check the later story: Good to know it will be back. I uploaded 4Gb on the last day I guess I won’t get credit for, but so long as the downloaders enjoyed it I’m happy anyway :-)
Take advantage of the downtime to organize your files and say to wife: “Honey I spend too much time on demonoid, but damn it, tonight we’re hitting the town!” :-)
Long Live Demonoid!!!
only just got on site as well. some bigwigs just cant leave things alone…… good luck demonoid
I recently know Dem was out! Today 27 at 15:00, before (26 and 25) I was downloading at speed of 60K, so I didn’t worry about check demonoid.com, until now when I saw the speed rate of download at no more than 1.5K.
Can somebody tell me when exactly demonoid.com was out?
My torrents are active, so the rate are sslllowly, do they keep slow until they finally disspear?
Thank You and LIVE DEMONOID!
F___ BRIEN!
Demonoid-User asks “My torrents are active, so the rate are sslllowly, do they keep slow until they finally disspear?”
The tracker is still running (don’t ask me how), but because the web site is down no one new will be joining. Eventually your peers will get fewer and fewer, so the slower dl speeds. When Demonoid comes back online, you’ll get new peers.
Thank you Jackson, that’s clear, I recently knew It hapened in the past, I’ll wait.
And there was i thinkin that dutch society was permissive and tolerant!
LONG LIVE DEMONOID!!! LONG LIVE TORRENTSPY!!!
The forum is back online.
http://fora.demonoid.com
With respect, the term “safe haven” doesn’t exactly apply for two fundamental reasons: 1) It is a US term, applicable to ISPs under DMCA legislation (neither the site nor the owners live in the USA) 2) the site in question is a prolific tracker and therefore deeply implicated in the act of distribution.
Passive indexing sites (those not directly associated with trackers) operate merely as search engines, and there is very little indeed that can be done to interfere with their operation.
Whilst I wish the owners of Demonoid every success, the choice of Canada as a supposedly friendlier jurisdiction seems a bit strange. As for Sweden and using PRQ….
you know, this is ridicilous….
the stupid judge was probably some 60 year-old fart who knows dick about computers and how torrents work. Likely the cunts that Brein hired as lawyers explained to the old man whatever they wanted in a skewed way so as to present it in a manner that suited their case.. Torrents cannot be legal by definition. There is no possible way that anyone using a torrent is commiting a crime. There is no theft. And even more, a site like demonoid does not keep the files. It just has the trackers. That’s more than just innocense. I mean, in the end, you don’t really need any site to for torrents. I can make a torrent with my isp and ports open, and publish the torrent in a forum like here.. people can do whatever they want.. A torrent is like keeping your door open, and letting anyone make random copies of random parts of your stuff…
You know what? i got an idea that will be impossible to shut down if it works. If everyone, i mean everyone who is in favor of torrents, becomes with their isp ort of a mirror or site or what not, keeping bits of information world wide, there is no fucking way they can shut down everyone online worldwide. It is just a metter of time.
5 references to this post
Pages: « 1 [2] 3 4 » Show All
Responses are closed
All remaining responses will continue to be archived. Use the TorrentFreak forums if you want to discuss something.