Another blow to the file sharing community, in particular the torrent community, comes as one of the biggest, most well-known websites, surprisingly decided to throw in the towel.
The news comes after similar events taken place recently, starting with ThePirateBay which was taken down by law authorities however managed to rise again (though not back to previous capacity as of yet), followed by the seizing of KickAssTorrets which hasn’t recovered to this day, and now, continued with the sadden, yet apparently permanent death of – ExtraTorrent.
Users who’ll decide to pay a visit to the website, via its main extratorrent.cc address or any of its mirrors, will be greeted by the following message:
ExtraTorrent’s shut down message
The closing seem to stem from an administrative decision, perhaps a financial in nature, rather than due to law enforcement intervention. Although, there’s a good chance that aspect was also taken into account as well.
Torrent news-focused website, TorrentFreak, reports[1] that:
“TorrentFreak reached out to ExtraTorrent operator SaM who confirmed that this is indeed the end of the road for the site.”
In itself, there’s nothing to be surprised by, actually, as file sharing services had long been the target of different media organizations (RIAA is one of the most prominent of which) as well as law enforcement authorities, mostly from the western hemisphere.
Certainly, the phenomenon is not new nor is it unique to torrent sharing sites either. From the beginning of the Internet the online struggle of law agencies was aimed at file sharing programs. One after the other they went down. Some of you may remember the ancient days when Napster, which revolutionized the Web with its pioneering audio files sharing, was one of the first to fall, then came and went other file sharing programs such as Kazaa and eDonkey – all suffered a bumpy, paved with lawsuits, road.
Interestingly enough, those of you who question the integrity of the fight in online file-sharing may find the following statement[2] by Lawrence Lessig – Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, supportive of your claim: “[…] this is a war on file-sharing technologies, not a war on copyright infringement”.
Lessig have said that after learning that the justice court would not authorize Napster’s file sharing even “When Napster told the district court that it had developed a technology to block the transfer of 99.4 percent of identified infringing material” – the district court answered in response “99.4 percent was not good enough”.
So far nonetheless, the file sharing community have managed to cope with the war waged on them, springing creative solutions every time others were no longer effective. Will the same continue in the future? we shall see…
