We’re sure that law enforcement officers having been trying their best to stem piracy. This is done by going after those who download copyrighted materials, hoping to make an example of them and deter future downloaders, or by going after the websites themselves, hoping to shutdown a source of pirated downloads. This is what police in the UK have recently tried to do when they went after a torrent website, Torrentz.eu. While the good news is that they did manage to get the domain name suspended, it did little to hamper the efforts of Torrentz.eu’s users, or the website itself, thanks to the fact that there were a handful of alternative domain names that users could simply redirect themselves to.
Over the past few months City of London Police have been working together with copyright holders to topple sites that provide or link to pirated content. The police started by sending warning letters to site owners, asking them to go legit or shut down. Late last year this was followed by a campaign targeted at domain registrars, asking them to suspend the domain names of several “illegal” sites. A few days ago police sent out another round of requests to various domain name registrars, asking them to suspend the domains of several allegedly infringing sites. Before the weekend we reported that the cyberlocker search engine FileCrop was targeted, and today the same happened to Torrentz.eu. Starting a few hours ago the popular search engine became unreachable after its DNS entries were pointed at ns1.blocked.netart.pl and ns2.blocked.netart.pl. The operator of Torrentz informs TorrentFreak that the site’s main domain name was suspended by its registrar following a request from police in the UK. The site is still registered to the Torrentz team, who hope that they will be able to lift the suspension or move the domain name elsewhere.