EliteTorrents

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

~ the obituary ~

In May 2005 I was a university student in Ankara and broadband was still a year away from my house. What happened in a federal courthouse in Virginia had no consequence at all for anyone I knew. The screenshot traveled anyway, because that was the point of it. A government had reached into a website and left a notice where the front page used to be, and the notice was the message.

EliteTorrents ran from 2003 and sat at the top of the tracker rankings for most of its two years. It was private, which then meant an invite and a ratio you had to keep, and that made it faster and cleaner than the public sites. The Justice Department later put numbers on it: more than 133,000 members, and in the final four months alone over 17,800 titles distributed 2.1 million times.

On 19 May 2005 an admin using the handle sk0t uploaded a workprint of Star Wars Episode III roughly six hours before the film reached theaters. It came off the tracker at least ten thousand times in the first day. That upload turned a copyright problem into a federal priority, and the MPAA, which had already gotten inside the site, pushed the case straight at Washington.

~ the case file ~

~ the banner ~

On 25 May 2005 the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement executed ten search warrants across the United States and took control of the server that coordinated the whole network. The domain owner was American even though the machine sat in the Netherlands, which is the detail that made the whole thing reachable.

Then came the part people remember. The front page was replaced with a notice saying the site had been permanently shut down by the FBI and ICE, laid out so plainly that the first reaction in the forums was that somebody had faked it or that the site was under attack. Half a million people loaded that page inside a week. Every seizure banner since, on every domain any agency has ever taken, is a descendant of it.

~ what happened to the people ~

The prosecutions ran for three years after the site was already gone. Grant Stanley was sentenced on 17 October 2006 to five months in jail and five months of home confinement, with a three thousand dollar fine on top. Scott McCausland, the sk0t of the Star Wars upload, got the same in December of that year. An Duc Do pleaded out for probation and a fifteen thousand dollar fine. Daniel Dove went to trial in 2008 and lost, facing up to ten years.

Nobody involved was accused of selling anything, and the person who leaked the workprint out of wherever it came from was never found. What the case established was that running the index was enough to be the defendant, which is the same conclusion a British court reached about Newzbin five years later by a completely different route.

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