In the past we’ve seen various prosecutions for one of the biggest torrent websites, the Pirate Bay. The site was forced to move its operations on the cloud, divided in two separate countries running several virtual machine setups. As the unnamed Pirate Bay representative describes in an interview with TorrentFreak:
“If one cloud-provider cuts us off, goes offline or goes bankrupt, we can just buy new virtual servers from the next provider. Then we only have to upload the VM-images and reconfigure the load-balancer to get the site up and running again.”
“If the police decide to raid us again there are no servers to take, just a transit router. If they follow the trail to the next country and find the load balancer, there is just a disk-less server there. In case they find out where the cloud provider is, all they can get are encrypted disk-images” -The Pirate Bay.
“They have to be quick about it too, if the servers have been out of communication with the load balancer for 8 hours they automatically shut down. When the servers are booted up, access is only granted to those who have the encryption password,” -It adds.
So, the cloud-hosting seems that currently saved the whole idea beside Pirate Bay.
During July of 2016, we’ve seen another big torrent website taking down from the authorities entirely and permanently. KickAssTorrents’ key player, Artem Vaulin, from Ukraine, was arrested on 20 of July, in Poland from where the United States has requested his extradition.
The owner is charged with conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and two counts of criminal copyright infringement. Assistant Attorney General Caldwell said that KickassTorrents helped to distribute over $1 billion in pirated files.
But the cherry on top happened yesterday, when the Torrentz.eu decided to close its windows forever. At first, the site was moved to the .eu top-level domain after its .com was seized by the US Department of Homeland Security. The domain is also blocked in the several countries, including the UK.
When Torrentz first came online the site was hosting torrent files, but it swiftly reinvented itself as a meta-search engine, the biggest of its kind. So, it only made it easier to find any torrent you want elsewhere. It was the biggest torrent meta-search engine that was connecting all the torrent websites together. Also, it did have a takedown procedure in place, allowing copyright holders to take down infringing links.
As torrent websites give their ultimate fight to stay alive and torrentz.eu decided to say “farewell”, this situation makes us wonder how all these will end. Is this the end of the Torrent World? If it is, what’s next? Because the world of piracy will be just trimmed for a short time and another solution might be born to stay for many years as well.