BTjunkie Closes Its Doors For Good, Out of Fear of Legal Action

Perhaps almost as shocking as the initial MegaUpload takedown is the wide-reaching effects it has had on the Internet landscape as a whole. It persuaded FileSonic and other cyberlockers to turn off file sharing of their own accord, and played a part in convincing The Pirate Bay to retreat to a .se domain. Now you can thank it for the closure of BTjunkie, which voluntarily shut down today, for fear of legal action to come.

A statement present at the site reads as follows:

This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!

BTjunkie was never directly targeted by law enforcement, but the inevitability of the event was something that dogged the site’s owners and operators, BTjunkie’s founder told TorrentFreak. BTjunkie had recently been reported to the U.S. Trade Representative November of last year, had been blacklisted by both the MPAA and the RIAA, and was one of the piracy-related sites censored by Google, along with The Pirate Bay, RapidShare, and uTorrent.

Of course, it’s not like BTjunkie is the only torrent site out there, but it was one of the larger ones, so its closure is bound to make waves in the torrenting community, especially those who moved over to BTjunkie after the losses of TorrentSpy and Mininova. While the MPAA and the RIAA continue to say that rampant piracy is destroying their respective industries, it looks like they’re having some level of success. Who knows how far it’ll go, but they must be pleased to see many of their targets saving them the trouble.

(via TorrentFreak)

Relevant to your interests

• The Federal takedown of MegaUpload
• The Pirate Bay’s migration to a .se domain
• A chief Rovio executive is interestingly unafraid of piracy