14 DAY TRIAL // It's well known the fact that media companies around the world have started a powerful campaign against the BitTorrent websites that encourage and enhance the distribution of pirated content, so such a piece of news shouldn't amaze anybody. However, when hearing about another BitTorrent service that bit the dust, most people want to know its name because giants like TorrentSpy already went offline after being involved in legal disputes. This time, the news concern a French BiTorrent tracker, namely EliTE-TEAM, which apparently shut down its servers after anti-piracy organizations got closer to the website.
What's interesting is that the administrators of the website first contacting torrent indexing services, asking them to stop publishing their torrents because copyright owners have already been interested in their service and they may go into trouble due to pirated material distributed on the website.
"Lately we received more complaints from anti-piracy organizations on behalf of major companies, because some of our members post our torrents on your indexer. I take the freedom of you ask whether it is possible to remove all torrents related to my tracker, and not to accept new ones in the future," the EliTE-TEAM administrator wrote in a letter sent to multiple BitTorrent indexing services, according to TorrentFreak.
At this time, the main website of the tracker is unaccessible and a notice placed on it informs visitors that the page got shut down due to multiple reasons. What's interesting is that the administrators didn't say that EliTE-TEAM went offline due to takedown requests issued by media companies. This is a similar case with the one involving TorrentSpy, another BitTorrent service that got shut down after a long period of legal disputes. However, TorrentSpy's owner explained that the main reason for shutting down the server was actually its costs and not the pressure made by media companies involved in the lawsuit.