TorrentSpy Shuts Down
Written by Ernesto on March 27, 2008A little over a year ago, TorrentSpy.com was still the most visited BitTorrent site, but times have changed. After an expensive two year battle with the MPAA, TorrentSpy decided to throw in the towel and the site has now shut down permanently.
TorrentSpy is no more, Justin Bunnell, the founder of the site writes: “We have decided on our own, not due to any court order or agreement, to bring the TorrentSpy.com search engine to an end and thus we permanently closed down worldwide on March 24, 2008.”
The main reason for the shutdown is the ongoing legal battle with the MPAA, which started February 2006. “We now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users - permanent shutdown,” Justin writes.
By the end of 2006 TorrentSpy was more popular than any other BitTorrent site, but this changed quickly in August 2007, when a federal judge ordered TorrentSpy to log all user data. The judge ruled that TorrentSpy had to monitor its users in order to create detailed logs of their activities, and hand these over to the MPAA.
In a response to this decision - and to ensure the privacy of their users - TorrentSpy decided that it was best to block access to all users from the US. This led to a huge decrease in traffic and revenue.
This was not enough for the MPAA, who argued that TorrentSpy had ignored the court decision. The legal battle continued, and this eventually led to a preventative closure of the site by Justin, to protect the privacy of its users.
Brokep from The Pirate Bay had this to say about the closure: “Today all big torrent sites are pressured somehow. TPB has its share of pressure, however we expected it and have a legal system that is more just in cases like this. The way that the copyright lobby is going at this is totally wrong and we can’t let them win. And we won’t let them win. Today we reached a loss of a site, but it was more a person having to give up for economical reasons than anything else. The copyright lobby has their big cards - money and influence. In the long run they will have to give up as well. And when they do, I’ll go to the US and buy Justin a well-deserved beer.”
At this point it is not clear what will happen to the TorrentSpy.com domain. Perhaps Justin should offer it to other BitTorrent site owners?
Previously: Mininova Helps CBC to Distribute TV-Show
Next: Comcast Teams Up With BitTorrent and Promises Net Neutrality
138 Responses
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torrent scene is just like the rap/hip hop and underground metal scene, people fall and they rise, or they fall and new ones rise
They will be missed by some, I guess, they have been on shaky ground for awhile this is probably best.
[quote comment="319795"]I always used TorrentSpy for my torrent needs because it had very good comment section. If something was fake or not good quality you would know from the comments. Then they decide to remove comments from site and i stop visiting. I didnt use it for quite a while. It was good while it lasted. Cya around.[/quote]
agreed, i used the site as well when it had a good comments system, now i hope mininova stays around
RIP - it used to be good but it was full of crappy porn ads by the end - no doubt this was for extra revenue.
This sort of thing is garbage. The torrent tracker does not host files and can’t be expected to monitor torrent content. What a stupid and worthless judgment also. Torrent sites are only in effect guilty of making a statement about file sharing at best. No-one can be prosecuted for an opinion, or can they?
They need to find a way to be anonymous it seems, and I hope others will spring up to fill any need. Maybe though it would be best at present to shut down immediately upon (official) legal threat to avoid litigation. Then others or new trackers could take up the slack, and if there was a good system, like a chain reaction, this could continue on indefinitely.
[quote comment="320711"]One down! 198 to go!
[/quote]
hahaha. When it gets to 10 down, there will be 260 to go :)
My fav site :(
http://pluking.blogspot.com
Good news IMO. These guys were in it for the money and did not give a fuck about a free Internet or free content. Ask them to give you free advertising and you will soon see what they were about.
Were they that bothered about protecting their uploaders or were they scared the opening of the logs would reveal they were doing the uploading?
There’s a new organisation out trying to find uploaders so they can sue them. Monetizing the pirates just like Torrent spy were doing it. Everyone said the record companies should work with the uploaders and downloaders, so it makes sense. Legal and legit biz as far as I can see.
Why am I bitter? I worked for a record company that laid me off because of piracy cutting int the profits. So tell me what a prick I am for getting pissed off.
“In response to the MPAA action, how about starting a total world ban of all MPAA related products?”
Does this mean for one month you won’t steal any MPAA products or will not buy any?
If you were buying it might make a difference.
Stupid idiot.
RIP
I am sad Oink, Demonoid, and then torentspy. MPAA and CRIA, You dont know you have turned massive amounts of heads against you. At the end, we will will and all those three sites will be Alive.
Hahaha torrentspy would be forced by the courts to actually spy on its users!
I’m glad they shut down. They did the right thing. You know that 3 or more similar sites will just take its place anyhow.
Suppi Duppi
[quote comment="321067"]Why am I bitter? I worked for a record company that laid me off because of piracy cutting int the profits. So tell me what a prick I am for getting pissed off.[/quote]
Think how differently things would have turned out if the music industry had said “Gee, this MP3 format seems to be getting popular. Maybe we should setup some kind of online store and sell music in MP3 format. It’ll cost us next to nothing to sell downloads and we can make a profit even at $.25 a song!”
Would Napster even have been invented? Why create a network to find and download music when you can go to one web site and legally download any song you want? Without Napster, would the other file sharing networks even exist? Maybe they would, but maybe their developement would have come much later.
Of course the music industry did what what every content industry does when a new form of technology appears; Try to have it declared illegal. The same thing happened with the VCR, DAT, CD Burners, etc.
When the music industry DID finally get around to noticing (a decade late) that people wanted to be able to obtain music in a digital format, they opened subscription services with limited selections, restrictive DRM, custom software required and prices that were completely out of touch with the actual costs of supplying digital downloads.
You want a real-world example?
I have a collection of about 50 games for Windows that I’ve bought either at a local closeout store (back when they used to get software that wasn’t crap) or on eBay. Now that I have a 3Mbs DSL connection, I could easily download any game I want. If given a choice between downloading a game for free, or paying $40+ for it at a retail store, I’ll probably download it. If the choice was between downloading it for free, or buying it for $10 at the closeout store, I’d happily buy it, just to have the manual and a factory copy of the disc.
By the same token, I’d also happily pay $5-10 to download a legal copy, IF it was supplied as a file that could easily be backed up to CD/DVD and didn’t require a net connection for online “activation”. (I still don’t own Half-Life 2 for this very reason)
People will pay if you give them a product that they want. The record companies want people to pay for the product that THEY want to supply.
hope TPB buys torrentspy :D
THIS IS GREAT NEWS!! I CANT WAIT TILL ALL THESE THIEVING TORRENT SITES GET SHUT DOWN! FUCK ALL YOU THIEVES!
VIVA LA GFY.COM
2 years ago it was awesome of course but since then … downhill. the comments section was closed long ago and you couldnt trust it anymore in any case. 2-3 years ago it was a good site, especially if you were a newbie of course. geesh, it’d be so awesome if demonoid came back.
What people forget is that torrent sites aren’t the source for the material, everyone gets the same recycled movies and TV shows from newsgroups! I don’t know who those people are who are the original rippers of TV shows and movies but it’s these people who post their product on newsgroups. The first users who download these products are users of super fast Usenet providers, which allow extremely fast direct downloads of TV shows and movies. Then some users who are the first ones to download TV shows & movies from ultra fast newsgroup servers seed these products to the private torrents. And then eventually these same products get seeded into the public torrents, such as TorrentSpy. So it’s a joke for the music and movie industries to try to gang-up on public torrents because in fact you could shut down all private & public torrents, that wouldn’t address the issue. All that would do would transfer all these users to various forms of direct download service from newsgroups servers! And in fact, direct download is the way to go because there’s no seeding while you’re downloading so there’s no huge police net to catch a bunch of users file sharing of the same torrent! I say screw the entertainment industry (especially after what happen in regard to the writers strike) and bring on reasonably price direct download via newsgroups for the masses!!
[quote comment="321672"]… So it’s a joke for the music and movie industries to try to gang-up on public torrents because in fact you could shut down all private & public torrents, that wouldn’t address the issue. All that would do would transfer all these users to various forms of direct download service from newsgroups servers! And in fact, direct download is the way to go because there’s no seeding while you’re downloading so there’s no huge police net to catch a bunch of users file sharing of the same torrent! I say screw the entertainment industry (especially after what happen in regard to the writers strike) and bring on reasonably price direct download via newsgroups for the masses!![/quote]
It’s not a joke to go after public torrents. It makes a lot of sense for the industry to transform torrent users into direct download users. Downloaders are much easier to control because they are in a server-client relationship. First you give them a reasonably priced, super fast, direct download to ease them into using direct download. Then you open some servers yourself or buy those that are around already and fix the price to whatever amount you want. Third, there is no seeding of copyrighted material, which is a major headache for the industry. And last but not least, there is no need for a large policing force that goes after file sharers, probably asks a lot of money and produces untolerable amounts of bad PR for the industry. That’s what I would propose if I was an industry adviser.
P2P is a much better way to distribute data because the peers decide what’s going on, not the server.
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