The Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) of the City of London police has had a successful run so far this week as it has managed to successfully order take downs of several major torrent indexes including ExtraTorrent, SumoTorrent, and MisterTorrent without any sort of court orders.
The newly formed unit sent out carefully worded letters to domain registrars of each of the above domain including many others stating that the domain / sites in question may be involved in copyright infringement.
Without making any reference to an active court order, the letter states that the owners of the mentioned domains are involved in “criminal distribution of copyrighted material either directly or indirectly and are liable to prosecution under UK law for the following offences: Conspiracy to Defraud, Offences under the Fraud Act 2006, Copyright, Design & Patents Act 1988.”
The letter continues stating that the PIPCU “criminal and civil powers in UK law to seize money, belongings and any property in connection with these offences.”
The letter, without highlighting any kind of legal backing, points out the obligations of the registrar and lists out possible violation of ICANN’s policy and registrar’s own terms of service. PIPCU sent out the letter to dozens of registrars across the UK and the effect is visible within 24 hours.
SumoTorrent.com, MisterTorrent.me and ExtraTorrent.com domains has have been suspended and are not reachable at the time of this writing. Some have migrated to domains with different suffixes, but have reported that traffic on their domains have plummeted.
the funny thing is – if there are no more torrent sites…I’ll just give up on entertainment period. I won’t be buying 30$ blu-rays of garbage watch one time movies or paying ridiculous cable prices for garbage shows…just to filter out the few quality items…
hear hear
hell yeah! exactly and this is what these insane retarded companies do not understand yet, apparently they will need to learn the hard way. they are in affect creating their own customer boycott by attacking them greedily. I too will be doing the same thing. I’m disgusted with their maniacal greed. They can go fuck themselves
once again, big money and power continue to try and strangle the last remaining breaths out of freedom and the people in an attempt to kill it completely. Their greed and hypocrisy is astronomically insane. Ironically they will not GAIN anything by doing any of this. They are wasting time and money in their attempts to squeeze the remaining pittance of money from the average poor person living today