People who know about torrenting, will either like or hate the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing method. Making up a large part of the world's internet traffic, the network is used by many to distribute pirated contents.
In less than a month after the shutdown of one of the most popular torrent site, KickassTorrent, the meta search engine Torrentz has also thrown the towel and closes.
The remaining traffic and file sharer are expected to move on to the two largest and remaining torrent sites, Pirate Bay and Extratorrent.
Torrentz shuts down with no prior notice. The operator of the site known as Flippy, has turned off and disabled its search function altogether. The site that has been online since 2003, has been a stable factor in the torrent community for over 13 years.
It was one of the oldest Torrent sources out there, ranking at 186th most popular website in the world with millions of daily visitors.
Torrentz wasn't like previous Torrent sites. KickassTorrents for example, was the host for shared files. Torrentz on the other hand, was a search engine which indexed 28 potential Torrent sources. Users used Torrentz to search for torrents hosted on other websites in one place.
What it did was offering compilations of various trackers per torrent that were not necessarily present in the default .torrent file, so that when a tracker was down, other trackers could continue their work.
It's the lack of actual torrent hosting that made Torrentz to appear more less affected to attacks than others, although it did have a copyright infringement notices sent to it.
Accessing the Torrentz.eu is still possible as the domain still lives. But now the site has announced to visitors in the past tense, saying that:
"Torrentz was a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine combining results from dozens of search engines." And and attempt to search or navigate the site will send another notice, saying a goodbye: "Torrentz will always love you. Farewell."
Downloading torrents and using P2P network to distribute contents have been one of the activities that populate the evergrowing internet traffic and population. With several torrent hosting websites and Torrentz being shut down, their absence won't decline the speed of online piracy.
The answer for this can be observed from the recent history where any popular torrenting site that shuts down will be replaced by a new one. So the pattern goes by: new torrenting sites emerge, those that made it to the top will eventually fall down, often due to legal pressure.
After they've been shut down, other new ones will emerge. So here we see that Torrentz shutting down will just put a hollow space for new ones to emerge from it.
Next websites that offer similar service will fill the gap.
A few hours after Torrentz shutting down, torrent fans were already comparing notes on its potential replacement. The discussion goes on some websites and discussion boards, notably Reddit.
So if history is about to repeat itself, the closure of two major sites related to torrenting won't put a dent on online piracy.