Torrentz.com, the largest and fastest BitTorrent meta-search engine has shut down Torrent’Em for alleged copyright infringement. It turns out that the flash based search engine we wrote about a few days ago, was using Torrentz’ data, without permission.
Most of the time when we write about BitTorrent sites that are put out of action it’s because of alleged copyright infringement. This time is similar, but with a key difference.
Torrent’Em is not accused of infringement by the entertainment industry, but by Torrentz, a fellow meta-search engine. The site is still online at the moment, but you won’t get any results when you try to do a search.
Flippy, the admin of Torrentz noticed a lot of search requests from the same source over the past few days. He soon discovered that the requests came from Torrent’Em, who simply fetched all data they needed from his site in real-time. So, every time someone search for something on Torrent’Em, he or she actually got a reformatted search result from Torrentz, without attributing the source of the data.
Copyright infringement, nothing more, nothing less. BitTorrent sites use each others data all the time, but not like this of course, since it puts a lot of strain on the Torrentz servers. “If he asked me nicely, I would have prepared a feed for him so he could use that”, Torrentz admin Flippy told TorrentFreak, who accused Torrent’Em of copyright infringement.
Torrent’em didn’t ask anything though, and Flippy had no other option than to block all the proxies Torrent’Em is using. This pretty much takes the whole site out of business, since there are no search results to display anymore.
Carlos, the admin of Torrent’Em was not available to comment, and it is unsure whether his site will be back.
