FILEnetworks Blog: TorrentSpy shut down + Alternatives

TorrentSpy, one of the most visited bittorrent search engines on the Internet, has permanently shut down its operations since 24th of March, 2008. Although the site merely indexed torrents and did not operate a tracker, it was popular among beginners to the bittorrent world.

The site has been in a prolonged court battle with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which resulted in the site blocking access to US visitors as well as deleting all cached torrent files from their server.

So is this a major blow to the bittorrent community? Although TorrentSpy will be missed, it will not be the end of the world. Here is what Brokep (Administrator of The Pirate Bay) had to say about the closure:

"Today, sadly, Justin decided to shut down TorrentSpy. It does not change things for the other torrent sites more than usual. New sites will emerge, the other torrent sites will get a small boost in traffic. It’s however very sad to see that the pressure put on one single peer has been so hard that one of the main players in the torrent scene has to shut down his site.

Today all big torrent sites are pressured somehow. TPB has it’s share of pressure, however we expected it and have a legal system that is more just in cases like this. The way that the copyright lobby is going at this is totally wrong and we can’t let them win. And we won’t let them win. Today we reached a loss of a site, but it was more a person having to give up for economical reasons than anything else. The copyright lobby has their big cards - money and influence. In the long run they will have to give up as well. And when they do, I’ll go to the US and buy Justin a well-deserved beer."

Alternatives:

If you were a TorrentSpy user and is looking for alternatives, here are some.