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"BitTorrent tracker TorrentSpy is closing its doors.  After years of court battles against copyright holders and lots of money poured into its legal defense, TorrentSpy has decided to shut down its service, according to The Register.  That's one point for the MPAA.  \nTorrentSpy lost a major court case to the MPAA last December, when TorrentSpy was found guilty of destroying evidence, making it impossible to hold a fair trial, and raked up a $30,000 fine.  The whole situation, which had dragged on for several months and even led TorrentSpy to block US IP addresses in an effort to avoid legal incrimination for providing the torrent-tracking service in the states, has aided in the anti-torrent movement gaining additional leverage in the larger war between copyright holders and torrents.  \nTorrentSpy founder Justin Bunnell, however, has stated that the loss of the court battle doesn't have anything to do with the company's decision to close down its service.  Bunnell posted the following statement on TorrentSpy:\n\nWe have decided on our own, not due to any court order or agreement, to bring the Torrentspy.com search engine to an end and thus we permanently closed down worldwide on March 24, 2008.\nThe legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests, and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile. We spent the last two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, defending the rights of our users and ourselves.\nUltimately the court demanded actions that in our view were inconsistent with our privacy policy, traditional court rules, and international law; therefore, we now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users - permanent shutdown.    It was a wild ride,    The TorrentSpy Team\n\nAs the US and our legal system has been the primary reason for TorrentSpy's demise, The Register has gone on to point out that the blocking of US IP addresses unfortunately resulted in a loss of traction and advertising dollars for the TorrentSpy service.  Additionally, TorrentSpy's legal loss may in fact give even more reason for torrents to be targeted in other countries as well."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/03/27/torrentspy-shutdown/>