One of the worlds TOP5 torrent sites, BTjunkie has voluntarily shut down.
The torrent powerhouse hosted over 4 million active files but had never been the target of US Federal action. Reacting to the recent demise of MegaUpload and less recently The Pirate Bay, BTJ admins are waving the white flag. It appears that a future filled with attorneys, arrests, seizures, and fines, didn’t seem much fun.
Recent FBI raids have flashed a bleak future for Torrent Sites. In January, US federal action resulted in arrests without bail for MegaUpload big shots including founder, Kim Dotcom.
which describes itself as The place where breaking news, Bit Torrent and copyright collide, reports that at least 2 other sites in the Top10 have considered the same action.
This change in attitude by torrent owners is because they are now GLOBAL TARGETS. Consider this, MegaUploads owners were German citizens living in New Zealand and yet they were easily arrested by US authorities. Torrent owners have been put on notice and are vulnerable regardless of local laws.
Headlines like, Is BitTorrent Done? make for some great reading, straight from those who are deeply involved with Torrent news, but I doubt that torrents are dead…yet.
Are Torrents Dead?
The very technology which caused this cops and robbers game is going to be the very thing that keeps torrents going. You can’t stop progress. The Internet is not going away.
Torrent owners like Gary Fung from isoHunt.com and Extratorrent’s admin SaM are fighting to continue file sharing.
Fung has been fighting civil lawsuits for 6 years, “What happened with MegaUpload is not at all good for the torrent world, but I would say it is impossible to stop the unstoppable. After all, if one site is shut down, a hundred new sites will open,” Sam said in an interview with industry observers, “We have no plans to shut down,we will continue running as usual.”
What do Torrent Users Say?
As you would expect you get the normal posts of “That Sucks”, “Thanks for the Memories”, etc, etc. but the overall feeling is one of BUSINESS AS USUAL. Users know it’s just a matter of time before someone takes the place of BTJ, ET, and TPB. They also know that new technology will be the key to Free movie, music, and file downloads in the future. There are always going to be people who go to a movie as an event and there are always going to be those people who refuse to pay for a movie. Who knows, maybe we will all be paying a US Entertainment Tax in the future.
Do you use torrents to acquire copyright protected, movies, protected software?
Tell me your thoughts, no FED’s here.
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