Torrentvalley is No More
Ever so often, the people in charge try to get tough with those who break the law. Sometimes, the ‘bad guys’ get away but more often than not, they get caught. And that’s exactly what happened to Torrentvalley.com yesterday.
Torrentvalley is different from other BitTorrent services in that it’s not a file tracker like Pirate Bay. Instead, it’s a torrent indexer. That means Torrentvalley does not host any torrents itself. Rather, it acts like a search engine and attempts to locate the torrent across different trackers.
Another interesting fact is that Torrentvalley’s servers are located in Bulgaria, a country not particularly noted for targeting file-sharers. Unfortunately, that hasn’t lasted very long. Acting on the advice of the Bulgarian Association of Music Producers (BAMP), the Cyber Crime Unit raided Torrentvalley’s premises and shut down its servers.
The charge laid against Torrentvalley was copyright infringement. To quote Ina Kileva, the executive director of BAMP: "Torrentvalley was a major international source of copyright infringing material. This site was a gate towards more than 5 000 torrent-trackers from all over the world. The decisive action by the authorities shows that Bulgaria is no haven for copyright abuse in Internet and makes efforts to protect the rights of those involved in the creative industries."
Torrentvalley certainly wasn’t the largest BitTorrent network out there. They had about 150,000 registered users but a fair number of people probably used the indexing service without registering. This does reinforce the fact that the authorities are always on the lookout for those that share copyrighted content.
Have you ever used Torrentvalley.com? What do you think about the site being shut down? Who do you think the next target will be? Let me know in the comments.
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Hey Martin,
You already know I’m from Bulgaria ^^ Trust me on this, we come to piracy for everything be it movies, software, games, songs and anything else you could think of.
There are many sad facts about our country and one of our biggest problems (if not THE biggest)is corruption. Hey, we are only â„–1 in Europe :P
So whenever the EU decides to remind us “please not be so obvious about this, we are fed up with you again” we do something like this to make them cool off and we start everything again…
Torrent tracker (many of which are not located in Bulgaria but are in fact pure Bulgarian) were prosecuted but to no avail. I’m willing to believe the same thing would happen to torrentvalley. I myself have never used this service given that we have trackers that have all the things (if not more) a globally recognised tracker like Piratebay would have.
So let not this simple intervention bother you ;) I’m sure things will come in place in time and it will probably open it’s doors again (just hosted elsewhere).
Cheers,
Лъчо
O.o One thing that bothers me about torrent users is how they believe their source never ends and justice is on their side. I say no glory among thief, specially when all the releases are stolen from the scene anyway.
“stolen from the scene”? HA!
torrents are so last year. it’s all about http hosts now :)
if software wasnt so overpriced then it wouldnt get pirated. the same goes with music.
I’m a Piratebay person myself so this doesn’t affect me.
garbanzo says:
“stolen from the scene� HA!
torrents are so last year. it’s all about http hosts now :)
For me it’s all about speed.HTTP is great but if i don’t want to pay anymoney,Netload is the only place where i can download with decent speeds(2MB/s) as a free user,so torrents still remain an option.I think Ray it’s right,same thing i belive it’s here also(Romania).The politicians never heard of bittorrent,p2p but if some UE comission would tell them to shut down something they will.
To y2k:
Oh the speed depends on your ISP most of the time. I download from RS as a free user with a speed of no less than 300-400KB, I’ve actually seen it go up to 1-1.5 MB/sec. Erm if you have access to our trackers you would of course get used to downloading with no less than 2-3 MB (actually the highest speed I have ever downloaded with was 11MB but my HDD started to fail and it had to be dropped for the time being :)).
But what I wanted to comment is that politicians have not only heard about p2p but they are using it intensely themselves! We had many screenshots of porn being downloaded from a governmental IPs :D And it was twisted as those morons in the high power… Sad.
stop putting so much prices on programms,music,movies maybe the struggle for piracy can be won
I am from Bulgaria and i can tell you as long as Bulgaria is no the map the piracy will grow.:))))))))))))
I’m come from Poland and it’s the same there. I bought a CD in Poland once and my friends who live there were looking at me funny and they said hey haven’t bought a CD for so long they forgot what a new cover looks like, they had EVERYTHING downloaded.