The largest torrent search engine Torrentz.eu is taken down

UK anti-piracy police recently took down the largest torrent search engine to curb illegal file sharing. The site’s domain was suspended by the registrar of its domain after a request from the UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit.

A similar site, FileCrop, has also been taken down. Many competitors have also been taken offline recently. Two of Torrentz.eu’s most significant peers — iso Hunt and The Pirate Bay — have been taken down completely or blocked in many countries.

The police began to block websites rather than targeting individuals towards the end of last year, when it asked Internet Service Providers to block 21 sites that link to infringing material. Unlike that move — which meant that Torrentz.eu was already banned on many ISPs — the ban on the domain means that users will be unable to access the site through any ISP.

See below for a full list of sites blocked in the UK by the new measures:

• Abmp3
• BeeMP3
• Bomb-Mp3
• FileCrop
• FilesTube
• Mp3Juices
• eMp3World
• Mp3lemon
• Mp3Raid
• Mp3skull
• NewAlbumReleases
• Rapidlibrary
• 1337x
• BitSnoop
• ExtraTorrent
• Monova
• TorrentCrazy
• TorrentDownloads
• TorrentHound
• Torrentreactor
• Torrentz

Photo Credit: Vince /www.flickr.com / CC BY-SA 2.0

By Akshatha Karthik