This means that these non-commercial services, powered by the open source Opentracker software, handled a staggering three billion connections per day – each.
We say handled, because the trackers have been offline since mid-January. The trio mysteriously disappeared and as a result of a court ruling in Germany they’re not coming back either. At least not at their German hosting provider.
Earlier this week a Hamburg court ordered a local hosting company to stop servicing the three trackers. In addition, the company has to hand over the personal details of the operators.
The ruling follows a complaint from the music industry group BVMI and is the first against so-called standalone BitTorrent trackers. These trackers do not host or process any infringing material themselves and are a content neutral part of the BitTorrent ecosystem.
According to BVMI CEO Florian Drücke the music industry has recently expanded its focus beyond traditional torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, to include these standalone trackers.
“Without the Tracker, it will be much more difficult for those who offer and seek illegal content to make the first connection,” Drücke says.
The downside, however, is that legal torrents also use these trackers to coordinate connections.
According to Christian Solmecke, a German IT lawyer who has experience with file-sharing cases, the verdict comes a a surprise.
“The court ruling amazes me. Apparently the court assumes that BitTorrent trackers are by definition something illegal. This is not the case,” he says.
The lawyer doesn’t deny that the trackers play a role in both legal and illegal transfers, but they are content neutral and merely passing on metadata, similar to a DNS provider.
“By the same argument these BitTorrent trackers are switched off you might ultimately forbid an ISP to continue to provide Internet access to end users, if copyright violations are committed,” Solmecke adds.
While the three targeted trackers have been offline for months already, the ruling means that these type of services had better avoid Germany as their home base in future.
“Apparently, the music industry sees the entire BitTorrent network as ‘evil’,” Solmecke concludes.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and anonymous VPN services.
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