For BitTorrent trackers that are hosted in Sweden, these are indeed dark times. Once a safe heaven for torrent sites, Sweden’s BitTorrent tracker scene has been collapsing ever since The Pirate Bay lost their case in Swedish court. In addition to the bunch of private trackers that closed earlier, two more popular Swedish trackers have decided to shut down their operations; SoftMP3 and SweDVDR. Another popular site based in Sweden, TTi.nu, has undergone major changes fearing legal action - It looks as if TTi will refrain from tracking copyrighted content in the future.
We have quoted below some of the messages posted on these sites informing members of the shutdown/changes. Note that some of these are translated versions since the original messages were in Swedish/Hungarian.
Following is now displayed on the homepage of SoftMP3, a popular private tracker that specialized in music torrents:
It is with great sadness we inform our members that this tracker is closed indefinitely on grounds of safety.
And quoted below is a new post from SweDVDR – a large torrent site that tracked untouched DVDR releases of Swedish and English movies. They were apparently threatened by Swedish Anti-Piracy Agency with legal action:
2009-04-22 - Swedvdr's future
Most Swedish trackers including Swedvdr has received threats from the Anti-Piracy Office so torrent activity must stop.
Since I do not want litigation against me will be sadly Swedvdrs tracker and torrents disappear within a week.
Like Swebits page will still be evident, including the Forum remains. / / Soft
Popular General/0Day tracker TTi.nu too have undergone a shocking policy change ahead of the mass shutdown of Swedish trackers. Below is a message posted by TTi staff on site homepage:
The future of TTi
All of us in Staff just came back from a 1 hour long meeting regarding the future of TTi. The meeting is now over and we have finally come to a conclusion.
From now on, TTi will only concentrate on bands/artists that want to spread their material on the Internet and waiting for a record contract. As you might have noticed, we have had our own music releases with bands that want to be spread around the Internet, hoping for a record label to spot them for quite some time. Because of all the turbulence and insecurity about whether it's okay to run a tracker or not, we have now decided to go full out on bands that want to be discovered through the Internet.
The forum will stay as normal. We know how much you like our forum, and we will do everything we can to keep up the awesome spirit that we have today. We will however make some small changes, all for the greater good.
More things will come up, but more info about that will come up later on.
We of course realize that many of you are disappointed about this suggestion, but we have decided that this is the best for the future of TTi, because closing down the site completely is something that will never happen. We hope that you will still hang around the site and help us out keeping the site as good as we have always been!
Best regards,
TTi Staff
Meanwhile the elusive and well hidden general/0day tracker DarkSide (DS – not to be confused with the torrent index DarkSide_RG) too have decided to shut down. Unlike other sites mentioned in this article, DarkSide is not shutting down due to legal threats (Swedish law has no impact on DarkSide since it’s a Hungarian tracker). As far as we know reasons for DS closure include the bad behavior (Hit and Run, etc) and attitude of majority of the site’s users as well as a flurry of low quality releases uploaded to the tracker recently. Anyways DarkSide was a great tracker and it will no doubt be greatly missed by it’s loyal members.
