Demonoid Back Online: An Early Christmas Present for Torrent Fans

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 15 Dec 2009

This autumn, in September to be more precise, popular torrent site Demonoid went down. Anti-piracy and pro-copyright groups were not to blame for this; Demonoid went down because it experienced some serious hardware problems. At the time it was estimated that when Demonoid would go back online, it would return with significant data loss. Things started to look better in November when Demonoid’s tracker went online. And it kept getting better from then on.

Demonoid is bow back online. Even if the site may not be accessible at times, it is definitely back up and running. This inaccessibility issue is because the servers are quite busy. There is more good news – it would seem there was no significant data loss, despite fears that old torrents and ratios would be gone once the site came back online.

On the downside, Demonoid is not taking any new registrations and RSS feeds aren’t working. Still, some pretty exciting news for torrent fans and Demonoid registered uses. One would go as far as to consider it an early Christmas gift – a welcome one if you take into consideration that popular torrent site Mininova partially shut down its site not too long ago.

Late this November torrent site Mininova announced that it took its BitTorrent platform offline, except for the Content Distribution Service which allows artists and producers to publish and distribute their content free of charge. It had to take this decision because after a legal fight spurred by anti-piracy outfit BREIN, the Dutch Court of Utrecht ruled that the BitTorrent Mininova platform acts unlawful.

“Unfortunately the court ruling leaves us no other option than to take our platform offline, except for the Content Distribution service. According to the verdict we have to prevent uploads of torrents to Mininova that refer to certain titles or to similar-looking titles. We’ve been testing some filtering systems the last couple of months, but we found that it’s neither technically nor operationally possible to implement a 100% working filter system. Therefore, we decided that the only option is to limit Mininova to Content Distribution torrents from now on. We are still considering an appeal at this moment,” announced the Mininova staff at the time.

As you can imagine, with pretty much everything gone, torrent fans moved to other sites; and Mininova traffic plummeted.


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