TorrentSpy, one of the biggest BitTorrent sites we heard of a few years ago, has decided to throw in the towel and close their doors, a permanent shutdown.

In 2006 they were the best and things looked pretty well until August 2007 when a federal judge ordered them to start logging user data and make it available to the MPAA. What they did? Blocked all US acceTss, which lead to a huge traffic decrease.

But that wasn’t all. MPAA said that TorrentSpy ignored the court order and continued the battle. As a matter of fact, the long lasting and obviously expensive battle with the MPAA is the main reason of the shut-down. Here’s what Justin Bunnell said:

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

R.I.P.

Breaking News: TorrentFreak has been shut-down by the FBI

Breaking News: TorrentFreak has also been shut-down by the Motion Picture Association and the German Federation Against Copyright Theft (GVU)

I’ve been a reader of TorrentFreak for some time now. They seemed to have a very big readership (if I’m not wrong up to 32,000+ RSS subscribers) all interested in BitTorrent news and related information, getting about 1 million unique users a month. Yes, that’s definitely a big blog that made it to Digg’s front page very often, but what is going on you may ask.

Well it’s either a hacker’s joke or they really got shot down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for criminal copyright infringement and are under investigation. However, when I refreshed I saw that they got closed by the German Federation Against Copyright Theft (GVU) and the Motion Picture Association for Illegal Downloading.

I think it’s obvious. Someone has control over TF and if you consider that for the last 48 hours they had server problems. These are just two screenshots I’ve taken but the “intruder” could have more.

If you’re one of their readers, like I am, I will keep you posted on what’s going on in a while.