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Torrentspy shutdown
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
- ROFISH 19y agoHuh. For one that goes down, ten will go up. Say what you want about copyright infringement, but too many people think that either it's OK to download or that they won't get caught. There's too big of a 'market' for illegal downloads.
- xlnt 19y agoThe majority of downloads are things people would not have otherwise bought, for whatever reason. In those cases, no one is being hurt, and someone is being helped. The reason torrent sites keep popping up is the vast amount of good they do.
- tptacek 19y agoI think the exact same thing about GPL software. When I secretly embed it in my products, I'm using code that nobody was going to make money on anyways. But by putting a shiny UI on top of it, I can! Nobody loses, and I win.
- xlnt 19y agoi see this is a comparison of some kind, but it's not very clear. in the movie downloading case, who is being hurt when they wouldn't have bought it anyway? or if no one, why is it bad?
- tptacek 19y agoIn the GPL case, who is being hurt, when the (a) the GPL violator wouldn't have contributed to the project anyways, and (b) the GPL provider wouldn't have collected any money? It's not a vague comparison; it's a cliche, about copyvio apologists tending to want it both ways.
- xlnt 19y agomaybe the competition who followed the law. maybe no one. i'm not sure. regardless of my opinion of who is hurt in the GPL case, i do have one in the movie downloading case. you seem to too, but you still won't say who is being hurt.
- tptacek 19y agoI don't accept your premise that the content downloaded on Torrent networks would otherwise not be paid for. So I'm going to go with, "the producers of content are hurt".
- xlnt 19y agoi said when it wouldn't be paid for anyway, then it doesn't hurt anyone. this is obviously common because people download more stuff than they could afford.
- tptacek 19y agoSo your argument is, even though a significant fraction of the market acquires a movie for free (the "vast good" the torrent networks do, in your view), the downloads don't depress the market value of the movie. In other words, when supply goes to "infinite", demand is unaffected. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.