TorrentSpy Website Closed

The well-known TorrentSpy website closed down this week. The message on their website now says:

"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"

It's too bad that piracy and copyright-infringement issues are making torrent files seem like a "bad" thing. They can be pretty useful at times, and for quite legitimate purposes. For instance, I had some training videos (full DVD image) available that I created for my tree planting website a year ago, but of course the files were huge - over two gigabytes each. I could host them on my server, and the bandwidth wasn't an issue, but when downloading a file that large, it takes a while and having a connection hiccup aborts the download if you aren't using a browser with some sort of connection manager. Torrent files solved that problem, and also distributed the bandwidth drain so that the server wasn't suddenly overwhelmed with the need to feed out hundreds of gigabytes of data per day during the peak part of the run-up to the planting season.

The closure of TorrentSpy certainly doesn't make torrent files less practical for legitimate hosting, but if torrents are punished enough, their common use will eventually become minimal enough that using them for legitimate means will be constrained.