Icelands largest Bittorrent Tracker shut down

Well, Europe has seen its share of tracker shutdowns this quarter, and now Iceland joins the list of trackers shutdown. Ernesto from TorrentFreak reports:

Things are heating up in Iceland as they witness the first BitTorrent related lawsuit. Torrent.is, the largest BitTorrent tracker in the country has received a preliminary injunction which has effectively shut down the popular tracker. The case was initiated by four anti-piracy organizations, who filed for the preliminary injunction earlier this month. The regional District Commissioners office granted their request last Monday. Source: TorrentFreak

There have been many bittorrent shutdowns since September, from TV-Links, Oink, Todotorrente.com, trackertdt.com and a plethora of others. Add to that the pressure on leaseweb to shut down bittorrent trackers, the issues in Canada, in general this has been a bad 6 months for bittorrent. Yet it is also in line with the pressure against Limewire, Kazza, and other more traditional P2P sites before they were essentially sued out of existence.

The question is what is going to replace it?

While smaller communities might replace what is happening, the more interesting concept is that the bittorrent industry as it is, is in danger of a complete collapse of the major tracking sites.

As we talked about weathering the bittorrent tracker outage, the new year 2008 is most likely going to see a regrouping of smaller sites, ones that will fly under the radar of anti-piracy operations. The larger the site, the more probable that those sites will be taken out in an anti-p2p operation, whereas a distributed tracking system in line with the way that bittorrent works, might be the technological change that is needed to keep under copyright holders radar.

There is also probably going to be an increase in sharing amongst trusted users, or smaller groups that interlink and use other protocols to share music, movies, and other media or data files. On line storage, fake user accounts, multiple redundancies throughout the system means that it will be much harder in the future to do good effective anti-p2p operations.

That is an issue for folks who work on Intellectual Property control, operations, and needing to know who and what is being shared across the networks. Smaller groups are harder to infiltrate, encryption, distributed tracking, other protocols, all of this is going to make anti-p2p operations much harder to conduct. It will be interesting to see how anti-p2p companies change tactics to deal with the altering landscape of file sharing. Somehow we think it will be much harder in the future, and much more expensive to everyone involved in the business.