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At TorrentFreak we have been keeping a close eye on the torrent ecosystem for more than a decade.

During this time, many torrent sites have shut down, either voluntarily or after being forced to by a court order.

However, never before have we witnessed events like those of recent weeks.

On July 20, KickassTorrents (KAT), the largest torrent site at the time, was shut down after its alleged owner was arrested. A few days later Torrentz said farewell, leaving many more without access to their torrent search engine of choice.

Just like that, two of the largest torrent sites had disappeared, causing much confusion and uncertainty among former users. Both sites had millions of daily visitors who needed to find a new home.

Now that the dust has settled a bit we take a look at the massive migration that took place.

First off, the search for alternative torrent sites is nicely illustrated by Google Trends. Immediately after KAT shut down, searches for “torrent sites” shot through the roof, as seen below.

“Torrent sites” searches (90 days)

While many sites across the board are ‘profiting’ from the shutdowns, most traffic appears to be going to the big players. The Pirate Bay, for example, which recently became the largest torrent site again, as well as runner-up ExtraTorrent.

To get a representative picture of changes we asked Similarweb for an overview of the traffic that flowed to the top five torrent sites over the past months, plus Torrentz. The data is taken from a sample of over 200 million devices measuring desktop visits only.

The graph below shows that traffic to all sites went up after Kat.cr was taken offline. Torrentz initially saw a sharp rise as well, but traffic tanked after its farewell message early August.

Traffic to the top 5 torrent sites (large)

In absolute terms The Pirate Bay benefited the most, adding several million daily visitors, with a relative increase of 67%. ExtraTorrent, however, doubled its numbers with a 101% increase, welcoming a lot of new users after the Torrentz shutdown.

The three other sites in the top five, RARBG, 1337x.to and YTS.ag, saw their visitor numbers go up by 45%, 53% and 44% respectively. Still good hundreds of thousands of extra visitors per day, according to the reported data.

The Pirate Bay team previously told us that they are happy to welcome these new users, which made it the king of torrents once again. Similarly, ExtraTorrent is also motivated to keep expanding.

“We always think and dream of growing and we indeed plan to keep growing,” ExtraTorrent’s SaM tells TorrentFreak, adding that the members of the site make it a success.

Aside from the big players, several smaller sites also saw their traffic rise. Initially, a lot of interest went out to ‘mirrors’ and copies of KAT and Torrentz, some of which are still doing very well traffic-wise.

Torrentz2, for example, greatly benefited from coverage in the Indian press. While the site is not that popular in the West, in India it quickly became one of the largest sites in the country with Alexa ranking it in 127th place locally.

Interestingly, however, there are also several torrent sites that have been ‘hurt’ by the recent takedown of Torrentz. As thelargest torrent meta-search, Torrentz sent traffic to a lot of ‘smaller’ sites, traffic that has now disappeared.

Torlock, for example, initially saw an increase when KAT went offline but after Torrentz folded their traffic tanked. The site currently has half the users it had two months ago.

“After KAT we saw a massive increase but I assume that was because Torrentz received much more traffic when KAT went down,” Torlock’s operator tells TF.

“Because we were very reliant on Torrentz when it shut down, it basically halved our traffic. So currently we are half of where we were before KAT and Torrentz shut down.”

With millions of people moving to new sites, it’s safe to say that the torrent ‘community’ is in turmoil, trying to find a new status quo. Whether the shutdowns will actually lead to fewer people using torrents is unclear though. Thus far we have not seen any evidence that this is the case.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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Like many countries around the world, Russia is trying to do what it can to limit Internet piracy. Copyright holders feel that if infringement can be reigned in, the legitimate market will flourish.

In common with the United States and Europe, Russian service providers are expected to remove pirate content when asked to by rights holders. The country also has a streamlined backup system via the courts if service providers won’t comply.

Back in August, Eksmo, a publisher responsible for around 30% of all Russian books, filed a complaint with Yandex, the country’s largest search engine. Through anti-piracy outfit AZAPO, Eksmo complained that Yandex was allowing links to pirated content to appear in its search results.

There were no allegations that Yandex directly hosted any of the pirate material. Eksmo said that unauthorized digital copies of several books were hosted by users of Russia’s most popular torrent site, RuTracker, and that links to those torrents appeared in Yandex’s results.

According to a copy of the complaint obtained by Gazeta, Yandex was given 48 hours to “cease publishing any information necessary to access the forbidden resource rutracker.org.” Yandex did not remove the results.

In response, Eksmo and AZAPO chose to file a copyright complaint with the Moscow City Court. Complaints to this Court kickstart a process through which non-compliant domains can find themselves blocked by local ISPs for an initial period of 14 days before a full case is heard.

Eksmo and AZAPO hoped to set a precedent which would force search engines to remove ‘pirate’ links to RuTracker, a domain already blocked in Russia. It wasn’t to be.

According to a statement obtained by news outlet Vedomosti, the Moscow Court rejected the application for preliminary blocking measures against Yandex, a company with 57.6% of the local search market.

According to a Court spokesperson, the judge found no grounds for issuing a blocking order since Eksmo failed to show that Yandex had violated the rights of the books’ author.

One of the problems with Eksmo’s request was that when examining the evidence, the Court found that the links in Yandex’s search results failed to link to the copyrighted works in question. Ironically, it appears those links may have failed due to the fact that RuTracker is already blocked by all Russian ISPs.

In response to the decision, Yandex spokesperson Vladimir Isayev said that the complaint had only been received from the publisher last week. Furthermore, the RuTracker links referenced in the claim also appear on other search engines and websites. So, following Eksmo’s logic, any site could find itself blocked had the Court ruled in the publisher’s favor.

Finally, Isayev noted that the courts have previously recognized that Yandex is a search engine, not an information broker, and as such cannot affect the accessibility of documents stored elsewhere on the Internet.

And so the battle continues.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.