One of my very first and favorite destination for torrents has been TorrentSpy. A couple days ago, the service has finally shut down after years of court battle.
It was just initially to US visitors but has now been implemented worldwide. The site will display this letter:
Friends of TorrentSpy,
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 legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests, and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile. We spent the last two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, defending the rights of our users and ourselves.
Ultimately the Court demanded actions that in our view were inconsistent with our privacy policy, traditional court rules, and International law; therefore, we now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users – permanent shutdown.
It was a wild ride,
The TorrentSpy Team“Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order […] and the like.” – Justice William O. Douglas
Are the bigger fishes next? Not Pirate Bay, please!
torrentspy helps me how to become a true I.T goodbye torrentspy thanks for the memories.
who cares? demonoid is back!
iba ba yung mga yan sa isohunt? dun ako nagsesearch eh.
PirateBay has fallen before but it came back very fast. Mininova is still strong. Goodbye torrentspy. :)
The solution to their “copyright” and “trademark” problems is simple: we need to become community-driven and community-oriented – remove the “money-system”.
But of course, it is close to impossible, now that the world is so used to “counting their riches and glory”. In a community-driven system, you have nothing to count, because each gets what s/he deserves, you can’t ‘charge’ higher. (It’s not even ‘charging’ per se…)
PirateBay can fall, but probability is sooo small. “Neutral” country.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaa.. :( I want to cry.
Will demonoid be the next to crumble? Its been awhile since they reup the site. Many are claiming it won’t be back. Ah hopefully they will..
@Lyne
Yup, that’s the hardest part there.
Demonoid tracker went down like TorrentSpy, but is back now, hosting it last month at Malaysia, before switching this month to Ukraine. Demonoid is now a forum though.
Pirate Bay though is nearly untouchable, because Swedish institutions, that includes their ISPs and their government, are notoriously liberal. Or maybe its just as simple as Swedish pride that makes them support their countrymen.
I read earlier this year that the Pirate Bay guys are offering to help the Demonoid guys, don’t know what happened to that though.
Can’t they just host their servers abroad?