Demonoid, one of the largest and most respected of the Torrent tracking sites has gone offline, allegedly having been shut down by the Canadian recording Industry Association (CRIA).
The site has now been down for almost 24 hours and counting.
Although the exact circumstances of the shut down are still unclear, rumours suggest that the CRIA are responsible for the current downtime. Even the Demonoid administrators are currently unaware of what exactly has happened.
That makes it seem likely that Demonoid’s Canadian ISP have pulled the plug after being pressured by the CRIA. While the server is still pinging, both the main site and forums are unresponsive.
Canada Not A Safe Haven
Demonoid has only been sited in Canada for 3 months after moving there from the Netherlands in June. They were forced to make the move, and suffered serious down time, after anti-piracy outfit BREIN launched a subpoena against their ISP.
Demonoid is currently the second largest torrent tracker on the web, after The Pirate Bay and tracks over a million torrent files. If this downtime is permanent, it is a huge blow to the BitTorrent community.
With the loss of TorrentBox and ISOHunt in the last few days, are the days of the pirates coming to an end? If The Pirate Bay suddenly goes offline, then I fear it may really be that bad.
