TorrentSpy

» see torrentspy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

torrentspy was a bittorrent search engine that indexed torrents from across the open web and let you search them by name and seeder count, with results filterable by size. it launched around september 2003 out of california, founded by justin bunnell. by 2007 it was indexing more than a million torrents and pulling enough traffic to sit in the top 200 most-visited sites globally, according to alexa rankings of the era. the site itself never hosted torrent files directly. it pointed at trackers and at.torrent files hosted elsewhere, which was the architecture that made early-2000s torrent indexes hard to attack on direct copyright grounds.

i used trackers in the mid-2000s. torrentspy was one of the ones in rotation alongside suprnova while it lasted, then later mininova and isohunt. by 2006 i was on ttnet broadband at home in ankara, which finally made torrent downloads feel like a daily-driver workflow rather than an overnight project. turkish isps did not particularly care about torrent traffic at the protocol level in those years. the actual concern was usually the upload-quota cap, not the legality of what was moving.

the motion picture association sued torrentspy in february 2006, framing it as a tracker-and-link site that materially induced copyright infringement under the standard set by the supreme court in mgm v grokster the year before. torrentspy's defense was that it was a search engine, not a tracker, and that it did not host or transmit the actual files. that argument was viable on the underlying copyright merits. the case did not end on the copyright merits.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it actually ended ~

the case turned on discovery. the mpaa demanded that torrentspy preserve and produce its server logs of user activity, including ip addresses tied to searches. torrentspy refused, on the grounds that turning over user ip-and-search-history pairs would itself be a privacy violation under california law. then the company modified its servers to stop logging that data going forward, and purged what was already there. the magistrate judge ruled in 2007 that this was spoliation of evidence under federal discovery rules.

once the spoliation finding was in, the actual copyright merits became less load-bearing. judge florence-marie cooper issued terminating sanctions and a default judgment in may 2008, awarding the mpaa $110 million in statutory damages across roughly 3,700 alleged infringed works. torrentspy had already pulled the plug. on march 24 2008 the site went read-only with a farewell notice from bunnell that pointed at "the legal climate in the usa for copyright, privacy of search requests, and links to torrent files" as the reason for closing.

~ what survived ~

the spoliation ruling is the part of torrentspy that survived. it established that for-profit sites under active litigation cannot purge logs in the middle of a case to protect user privacy, even when there is a colorable privacy argument for not retaining those logs in the first place. that has shaped a long line of subsequent file-sharing and platform-liability cases. the practical lesson read by every torrent indexer after 2008 was that the safest log-retention policy is to never have started logging at all.

the broader cohort torrentspy belonged to has mostly followed it into the ground. suprnova died in december 2004 under slovenian legal pressure. mininova went legal-content-only in november 2009 after a dutch court ruling, and isohunt settled with the mpaa for $110 million in october 2013. demonoid had a longer and weirder life through several relaunches. the torrent-index era was effectively a five-year window between 2003 and 2008 when this entire category of site went from indispensable to legally untenable.

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