The BitTorrent indexing website btjunkie has decided to shut down voluntarily. It is another victim of the anti-piracy movement. The company in 2011 was the fifth most well-known torrent site online and it had launched to download indexing in 2005.
The team behind the site said in a statement on Sunday “We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on.”In the last few weeks similar websites have closed down or have been restricted by legal enforcement. The shut down of these websites probably could be due to the influence from external sources and legislation proposed like SOPA and PIPA.
Btjunkie used a web crawler to search for torrent files from the cyberspace rather than hosting files like in the case of MegaUpload another victim of anti-piracy movement. Private and public file-sharing sites were indexed, btjunkie serving up possible download links for peer-hosted content and fleshing them out with user-reviews to weed out bad or corrupted downloads.
“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 said.
Torrent indexers like btjunkie have grown increasingly controversial as the film and music industries attempt to suppress on methods of acquiring copyrighted materials. Rupert Murdoch, Chief Executive at News Corp. considers Google, as the ‘piracy leader’ after coming across how simple it was to use the search engine to discover download links for Sony-produced movie. btjunkie has not provided any public reasoning as to why it chose now to close down. With renewed awareness on piracy amid the MegaUpload trial, though, it wouldn’t be the last site to think of shutting down rather than facing investigation.
