14 DAY TRIAL // ExtraTorrent’s site went down after the UK police asked for the domain to be closed and the site’s owners are threatening with legal action to get the site back in working order.
The Intellectual Property Crime Unit of the City of London Police has taken one step further into fighting torrent sites and targeted a new bunch of big names in the torrent world – ExtraTorrent, SumoTorrent and MisterTorrent, as well as MP3 sites emp3world.com, full-albums.net and maxalbums.com.
The police sent out a series of threatening letters to domain registrars asking them to suspend the domains of the sites that the police and the entertainment industry officials say contain copyright infringing content.
The documents make absolutely no mention whatsoever to a court order or due process, something that was immediately spotted by one registrar approached by the police, as they refused to suspend the domain of TorrentPond.
But by the time the registrar published the letter received from the police, numerous sites had already gone dark.
ExtraTorrent, the 5th largest torrent site in the world, is particularly annoyed with the domain registrar for suspending everyone.
“After contacting PDR they kept giving us funny replies but finally gave us a copy of the PDF file sent by the London Police,” the site’s owners told TorrentFreak.
“This was even more funny than the rest of the communications we had with PDR Ltd because it turned out that the suspension was solely and willfully under the discretion of the registrar and with no legal basis,” they said.
It seems the registrar didn’t even analyze the content of the email sent by the London Police, but they got scared and acted upon the message despite there being no legal grounds to such an action.
“We are going to fight this action legally if needed,” the site said.
Given the situation, they could win the case.