Well another one of our comrades has fallen to the MPAA army of darkness, in a recent voluntary movement the extremely popular torrentSpy website has closed its doors, permanently. After almost 2 years of ongoing struggle with the US Courts and an expendature of thousands of dollars, the owners finally threw in the towell. It seems what the courts couldnt do with legislation and laws, they finally did with paperwork.

A statement on the torrentSp site reads as follows;

“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”

Its a shame to see another of these site which fought so vigilantly to protect the rights of themselves and their users closing their doors permanently, it wouldn’t surprise me to see this site adopted by their friendly pirate bay cousins in a similar move to the SuprNova re-opening which occurred earlier this year, rumor has it that Justin, the owner of the TorrentSpy domain has already been openly offering the domain name to other torrent websites, but at current no sale has been made, but as i said, its only a matter of time.

Brokep from The Pirate Bay had this to say about the closure: “It does not change things for the other torrent sites more than usual. New sites will emerge, the other torrent sites will get a small boost in traffic. It’s however very sad to see that the pressure put on one single peer has been so hard that one of the main players in the torrent scene has to shut down his site.

Today all big torrent sites are pressured somehow. TPB has it’s 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.”