BTjunkie Website Shuts Down Voluntarily Following Megaupload And The Pirate Bay Lawsuits

As the war against internet pirates will never end, BTjunkie has announced that it’s going to shut down itself as of today. The owner of the website has revealed that after The Pirate Bay and Megaupload cases, BTjunkie has become a target of legal pursuers therefore it’s better to shut down now before it’s too late.

BTjunkie was a website which indexed BitTorrent results on the web since June 2005, and it was host of several millions of monthly users. Although there were no files hosted on BTjunkie, an official complaint was filed by the RIAA and MPAA because this website was facilitating copyright infringement.

According to the MPAA and RIAA, BTjunkie was a rogue website, and they reported it to the US Trade Representative in 2011. At the moment it’s unclear how soon these two parties would have filed suit against BTjunkie, and if they would have won, however, the owner of the BitTorrent index website decided that it would be unwise to risk.

He said that the “war is far from over” and that other websites of this kind will show up on the web in the near future. A message posted on BTjunkie says that “it’s time to move on” and although “the decision does not come easy” this is the best thing to do at least until things will cool down. Judging by the message posted on the website’s homepage, we don’t think that BTjunkie will ever return, but never say never.

BTjunkie’s owner was afraid that the MPAA will come after him, and thanks to the resources at their disposal, he might have “shared” the same faith as Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom who was arrested last month along with 6 other people for hosting copyright infringing material on Megaupload.

Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay founders have also lost their final appeal, meaning they’re going to serve prison time. The Pirate Bay website will remain online, the only difference being the fact that the domain name has been moved to Sweden.

We expect to see a lot of people complaining on Twitter and Facebook over BTjunkie’s owner decision, however, we don’t think that he’s going to change his mind considering the alternative.

This is not the first voluntary action of the kind as several file sharing websites including Uploaded.to and FileSonic have shut down their “sharing” capabilities, and they’re acting only as personal web storage solutions.

We don’t know who’s going to be next or what’s going to happen, but it’s clear that we don’t need SOPA, PIPA, or ACTA to put internet pirates in jail or shut down their websites. It’s clear to me that such legislation is absolutely unnecessary for the moment.