DanishBits

» see danishbits.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

DanishBits was the private tracker Denmark actually used. It was invite-only and Danish-language, which kept it modest by international standards and enormous by local ones: around 40,000 monthly users in a country of under six million, and two million visits a month. Rights Alliance, the national anti-piracy body, placed it among the most visited websites in Denmark full stop, not among the most visited pirate sites.

The content mix is what turned it into a national problem rather than a hobby. Danish films appeared on DanishBits before they were legally available, several of them downloaded more than 30,000 times, and a domestic film downloaded 30,000 times in a market that size is a measurable slice of the whole audience. Rights Alliance reported the site to the police in 2016 and then waited four years for anything to happen.

The operator went by MrDB. He kept the servers fully encrypted and said so publicly, and he ran the site's money through a channel that converted Bitcoin into Danish kroner before it landed at a bank in Belize. All of that worked. What did not work was staying anonymous inside a small scene where the other trackers knew him.

~ the case file ~

~ how the lawyer got in ~

Thomas Heldrup of Rights Alliance registered on DanishBits as a regular user around 2016 and behaved like one. He read the forums and worked out which accounts were staff. Over the better part of four years he assembled a picture of the operation from inside it, then followed the payment trail out through the Bitcoin conversion to Belize.

The last piece arrived free of charge. MrDB's real name surfaced during a public fight between rival Danish trackers, the kind of feud a closed scene generates on its own, and after that the authorities only had to locate the man. He was living in Morocco.

A Danish-language tracker with closed signups was never something I could reach from Turkey, and that is not the usual sort of distance where a product was too American or too early. It was a deliberate border. National trackers were built to be unreachable from outside the language, which is what kept this one running for a decade and also what made one undercover member fatal to it.

~ the day it went quiet ~

The arrest happened in October 2020. Within days the site stopped answering, and the remaining staff put up a message: "Dear users, with pain in our heart we must inform you that DB as you all know it, and which you all have loved, unfortunately seems to have reached the end of the road." The same note reminded members that the servers ran full encryption and that reaching the data was practically impossible, which was reassurance and warning in one sentence.

NordicBits, the other large Danish tracker, had gone down weeks earlier in the same operation. Its operator was 69 years old and living in Spain. He admitted his part under questioning and agreed to close the site himself, then died of illness before the case ever reached a court.

~ the courtroom ~

Morocco extradited MrDB to Denmark in March 2021. He admitted his involvement, and that April he was sentenced to a year in prison with nine months of it conditional, so three months of actual time for running the largest file-sharing site in the country for over a decade. Six further arrests followed in January 2021 as investigators worked down the staff list.

Police then said publicly that they were interested in users and not only operators, and that did more to empty the Danish scene than the shutdown itself. The replacements that grew into the gap, Asgaard and ShareUniversity, were offline within months, one of them closing voluntarily rather than waiting for a knock.

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