It may not have the drama of the recent Megaupload takedown or a surreal villain such as Kim Dotcom but it has been reported this week that BTJunkie has come out with its hands up by voluntarily taking itself off-line.
Founded in 2005, the US based site is one of the largest and well-established file sharing Torrent based sites on the web. Its creators have seemingly made the decision to shut down after legal cases against The Pirate Bay and Megaupload.
At the beginning of this week, the BTJunkie homepage displayed a message saying: "This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime”.
The site was never directly targeted directly by copyright holders, but Torrentfreak reports that it was reported to the US Trade Representative (USTR) November last year. The RIAA and MPAA listed the torrent index as a ‘rogue’ site and ‘BTjunkie’ became a search term
As we’ve seen before, the chameleon like nature of torrent sites sees developers churn out crap sequels faster than Hollywood so it won’t be long before people are able to seek out illegal content at ‘MEGALOLZFILESHAREDOTCOMZ’ or some other equally desirable online destination. If Dotcom’s dramatic mansion raid was a bit like the end of Scarface, this one was a lot more Dog Day afternoon.
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