SweTorrents

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

~ the obituary ~

SweTorrents opened on 25 May 2005 and indexed torrents pointing at warez scene releases. It was private, so you had to register to use it at all, and in its later years registration closed entirely and the only way in was an invite from somebody already inside. One person ran it, under a handle, and that handle is still the only name attached to the site in any public record.

Early in 2009 the Pirate Bay trial put every Swedish tracker in the same weather. Antipiratbyrån wrote to the people behind most of them, and most of them read the letter and shut down. SweTorrents stayed up, which is the decision the rest of its story runs on.

On 3 August 2009 four film companies, Svensk Filmindustri and Yellow Bird among them, petitioned Södertörn District Court for the subscriber details behind the site. They were using IPRED, a Swedish copyright enforcement law that had come into force that April and had never been properly tested. The court agreed on 4 December and attached a penalty of 750,000 kronor if TeliaSonera did not comply. Telia said on 7 December that it would appeal.

~ the case file ~

~ the court order ~

Telia's public affairs man Patrik Hiselius told SvD why the company was fighting: IPRED was a brand new law, it needed testing so that the questions of confidentiality and proportionality got answered, and the bar protecting privacy should be set as high as possible. That is an odd sentence to read from a telco, and it is worth keeping in mind that Telia was not defending the tracker. It was defending the principle that the name of a paying subscriber is not something a film company can simply request.

The appeals court did not agree. In May 2010 it upheld the district court, leaving Telia facing that 750,000 kronor penalty if it kept the name. Seven days after that ruling the operator closed the site at 12:45 in the afternoon. His farewell post said the site would cease to exist on 25 May, five years old, thanked the uploaders and the staff and the rest of the membership for a good run, and then thanked Telia for looking after its subscribers' privacy. He also warned that links to other trackers would not be tolerated in the comments.

~ what got buried with it ~

In June 2010 he asked the old users, in a post whose title translates roughly as "new owner for SweTorrents.org, good or awful?", whether they wanted it back under somebody else. Several people had written offering to take it over. He went back and forth with them by email for eight months and then, on 4 March 2011, posted that there would be no new owner and the site would stay where it was. The membership database had been deleted. The PHP for the tracker and the community had been put away on a DVD.

What kept SweTorrents out of reach was the door rather than the language. Invite-only membership grows through people who already know each other, which in practice draws a map of one country's social graph and stops hard at its edges. I was on a TTNet line in Ankara following the Pirate Bay verdict along with everyone else. The tier of Swedish trackers sitting underneath that verdict had no surface facing me at all.

swetorrents.org does not resolve today. The status blog on Blogspot does, sixteen years after the last post went up on it, with the March 2011 notice still at the top of the page.

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