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.