Last month the private BitTorrent tracker XNT.nu was raided, a site which had risen from the ashes of other sites shut down by the authorities in 2009. The raid and arrests in this new case have now claimed another casualty in the form of Piratetorrents.nu.

With roughly 25,000 members Piratetorrents.nu was one of the largest private BitTorrent trackers still standing in Sweden, but as of this week the site is no more. While numerous private trackers shut their doors every year, it’s not often that a site’s staff are so open about their decisions as they are this time.

“As you can see, our website and tracker are not working anymore, this is because we don’t dare take any more risks! All of the staff have a private life to think about, and they no longer want to take the risks inherent in running a tracker,” Piratetorrents’ staff announced.

“In other words, we are throwing in the towel and ending this business before something possibly happens to us in staff. There are too many laws and rules against this stuff and it’s not worth the punishment,” the message adds

A source close to the site’s staff informed TorrentFreak that the raid of XNT and the subsequent arrests had a major impact on the decision to close the site.

Over the years Sweden has proven to be one of the most active countries when it comes to taking action against BitTorrent sites, and the site’s operators were no longer willing to put everything on the line.

Adding to the XNT raid there was also a Scene notice posted recently, with information on another site that was allegedly used to automatically upload content to Piratetorrents. To make matters even worse, this notice also linked one of the XNT arrestees to the Piratetorrents tracker.

“Another p2p-tard who was involved in Piratetorrents autobot is pulchi, he was just caught by the Swedish police in a bust, due to his involvement in another tracker called xnt.nu,” the Scene notice reads.

The demise of Piratetorrents is yet another example illustrating that Sweden is not the safe haven for torrent sites some believed it to be. Although the largest torrent site on the Internet is still active there, many smaller sites have either quit or moved abroad.

Source: Torrent Site Throws In The Towel Fearing Arrests

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The Pirate Bay: Five Years After The Raid TorrentFreak Today, exactly five years have passed since The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police. At the time the entertainment industries hoped that this would silence the deviant BitTorrent site for good, but in hindsight we can conclude that they had …

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May 31, 2006, only two years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in the outskirts of Stockholm. The officers were tasked with shutting down the largest threat to the entertainment industry at the time – The Pirate Bay’s servers.

In the months leading up to the raid the US Government threatened to put Sweden on the WTO’s black list if they refused to deal with the Pirate Bay problem. Even the MPAA was involved, with John Malcolm, Executive Vice President of the MPAA, writing a letter to Sweden’s Secretary of State in which he stated, “It is certainly not in Sweden’s best interests to earn a reputation among other nations and trading partners as a place where utter lawlessness with respect to intellectual property rights is tolerated.”

The pressure worked and The Pirate Bay’s servers went down, but to the disappointment of the entertainment industries this only lasted for three days. Instead of calling it quits The Pirate Bay founders fought back, and in an ironic twist all the attention from the press due to legal troubles helped grow the site to what it is today – the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet. Apparently it’s easier to overthrow governments than to take a website down.

At the time of the raid The Pirate Bay had only a few hundred thousand registered users, but with the spotlight on the deviant Swedes, the user count soon skyrocketed. At the start of July 2006 the site broke the magical milestone of one million registered users, and that was just the beginning.

Today, despite numerous court cases, blocking attempts by ISPs and two full trials at the Stockholm Court, The Pirate Bay has welcomed its 5 millionth user. Quite a remarkable achievement for a site that doesn’t even require registration to download. Day in and day out, a few thousand new users sign up for an account at the most-visited BitTorrent site.

There is of course also a downside to the ever growing list of users, as the site’s popularity also makes it a huge target for spammers who want to pass off their fake torrents pointing to malware. TorrentFreak talked to one of the Pirate Bay moderators, who said that indeed hundreds of ‘spam’ accounts and fake uploads have to be deleted every day.

Needless to say, without the moderator team the site would become pretty much be unusable in a matter of days. Yes, The Pirate Bay also has several algorithms to spot the obvious spammers, but even after this first screening hundreds of torrents have to be removed manually.

The current moderator team exists of about 40 people, half of which are full moderators and the other half so-called ‘helpers’. Together these people remove numerous fake torrents and spam accounts every day, abiding to a strict take-down policy that does not cover copyrighted material.

The big question is whether the site will live to welcome its 10 millionth user in a few years from now. The community and moderators – who all work for free – is certainly large enough, but the pressure from the entertainment industry on ISPs and governments is ever increasing. But then again, this never stopped The Pirate Bay before.

TorrentFreak

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Acting on information provided an anti-piracy group, Swedish police have carried out raids and taken down at least one warez scene topsite. Items seized include at least a dozen computers and servers containing a conservative 200 terabytes of media, mainly Hollywood movies. As other sites get sucked into the fallout, the recriminations and finger-pointing have begun.

This week, Swedish authorities again turned their attention to The Scene, the collection of servers and individuals which inhabit the top of the so-called piracy pyramid.

Following a lengthy investigation by anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån, during the last 48 hours Swedish police acted on their evidence and moved in on at least one ‘topsite’.

The site, which supposedly carried between 200 and 250 terabytes of media, was known as ‘Devil’. During the raids police seized a dozen servers and other computers and detained one person.

The individual, who is believed to have been handed over to Antipiratbyrån for questioning, is accused of being the operator of ‘Devil’. He is blamed for the distribution of “tens of thousands” of mainly Hollywood movies.

In what appeared to be a security response to news of the bust, other topsites started going down in Sweden and at least one other major European country.

Elements of two other topsites with links to ‘Devil’ known as Secu and Tomte (250 terabytes combined) have also been affected but so as not to compromise our sources, we will refrain from going into further detail as to why at this stage.

Suffice to say that some fairly important movie release groups (particularly Swedish ones) were connected to the sites and their activities will have been disrupted, at least temporarily.

Within the Scene the recriminations have begun, with fingers pointed at individuals and groups who are suspected of having caused the security lapse which led to the busts. Not unexpectedly, the accusations appear to be focused on Scene members who are also connected with P2P sharing groups, a frowned upon activity but one that is nevertheless widespread.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

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