Talk:TorrentSpy

I've rewritten a substantial amount of the page and removed a lot of POV. This article may need to be monitored as it appears that some anonymous contributors are adding POV info to it. I'll keep working on it.

Also some info about the new partnering with Searching.com needs to be added, as well as some info about their "news" feature.  splintax  (talk) 08:45, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

I've added in a section on TorrentSpy the application. I realize that the "correct" way to do it would be to split it into a disabiguation page and all that, but I don't know if the relative obscurity of the application merits that. I trust someone smarter will come along and make things right if necessary.

RickOsborne 05:31, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

I was wondering if someocould shed some light on the recent events. Yesterday, torrentspy.com was working and everything was free and fine, today torrentspy.com is dead, BUT there is another website that popped up called torrentspy.ORG and they want have to join to use it which includes paying for "support and technical info". My question are is the .com just down temporarily or is it down permanaetly and replaced with a pay site. Also I thought that by definition in order to be an ORG or you had to be nonb profit and nots ask for money, (though you can bed for donations). So has torrentspy decided to turn corparate to make money off the fade of keeping other companies who made the original content. Persoanlly I think that this is crap and would like to know if this is true as I feel like starting a boycott.

E.au 9 September 2006 (UTC)

I don't think any website, much less a torrent index, being down for one day is reason for concern. The .org and .com domains also appear to be owned by completely different people. I know this was a while ago, but torrentspy.com appears to work fine now, and searching for, viewing and downloading a couple of test torrents hasn't resulted in me seeing any 'pay us money or get off our site' notices. In the future, perhaps take a chill pill and just wait a while until the site in question comes back online?

Category Restructure
E.au 9 September 2006

I don't use TorrentSpy, but I would assume that the category restructure, which a number of other similar sites have seen in the past, would be in order to remove any explicit references to obviously copyrighted material that is being illegally shared. For example, having a category called 'The Simpsons' under 'TV' (I don't know if such a category ever existed on the site, although it is likely; but it's just for an example) makes it obvious that material relating to 'The Simpsons' - most likely, pirated episodes -are to be shared from within that directory, and means it's difficult for the site owners to say that they don't condone the sharing of illegal material. If the categories are vague, such as just 'Videos' where torrents for both illegal movies and television episodes are uploaded to, then they could simply say that it was intended for home videos or other non-copyrighted videos that may be freely and legally shared across the Internet. Because this is just speculation or point of view, I don't know if it should actually be added to the article or not. For the record, the paragraph mentioning this issue isn't very well written.

Update on lawsuit
Google seems to have a total lack of information after early June regarding the site's appeal of the court ruling, etc. Has there been anything new in this fight or is the appeal currently in legal limbo? 68.146.47.196 04:07, 8 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Also, Torrentspy.com lists that "no coart order" was responisble for blocking US users. and that "it was entirely their desision". 198.83.124.253 21:15, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Thoses articles might help I haven't got through all of it, but it might be interesting. Valmoer 18:53, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
 * in English : http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/10/p2p_hacker?currentPage=all
 * in French : http://www.ecrans.fr/Confessions-d-un-traitre,2412.html

TorrentSpy has lost the case
See this story from today. It appears that TorrentSpy tampered with evidence, among other things. I've put a update tag at the top of the article because of this. --Dreaded Walrus t c 11:07, 20 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Not really. The judge simply failed to understand the fact that RAM is, infact, volatile and could have actually been lost. Also, what I don't understand is, why the owners have to give the logs since the servers are based in Netherlands and hence the local laws apply. Why are they required to depose before an American court? Giving the logs to MPAA is a flagrant violation of privacy laws in Netherland. I fail to grasp this, could you please explain? Thanks a lot. Regards, 122.167.9.114 (talk) 14:41, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Current events tag appropriate?
The sudden closure of TorrentSpy worldwide is likely to send shockwaves through the Internet user community. Would it be approriate to place the "Current Event" tag on this article? 23skidoo (talk) 12:35, 27 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes definitely. The closure of torrentspy is a landmark ruling at crippling the backbone of filesharing on the internet. Also, if you examine the case closely, the Judge disregarded pleas that servers were located outside US and hence the owners had to follow privacy policies in accordance with the local laws. Also, the judge failed to "understand" the fact that RAM is actually volatile and hence contents of the RAM can infact be lost to a power outage. This judgement shows the urgent need for the Internet to be governed by an independent INTERNATIONAL body and not the "big brother" govt. of the United States of America which does not value the privacy of its own citizens. I can't write very well, so would request some of the more accomplished editors to add this fact to the article. - bodhi 122.167.9.114 (talk) 14:11, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

TorrentSpy application
Shouldn't this be split into a separate article? It is not directly related to the TorrentSpy website and should get its own article. It is similar to the case of BitTorrent (protocol) vs BitTorrent (software). I would thus suggest TorrentSpy (software) as the target article name. Andareed (talk) 02:33, 20 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I went ahead and did this. Andareed (talk) 23:05, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Should there be some info about the recent 111 million dollar copyright infringement penalty? Apoyon (talk) 08:48, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Incorrect statement
"The Motion Picture Association of America filed a lawsuit in February 2006 for TorrentSpy facilitating copyright infringement as many torrents on its site were copyrighted films." First, torrents are NOT, and can never be, "copyrighted films". A torrent is just a text file that can "point" to a copyrighted film, similar to a link in a Google search result. A big difference. The current phrase give the false impression that films were actually on their server. Secondly, many copyrighted films are allowed by the copyright holder to be shared (creative commons for example). It need to be rephrased. Kricke (talk) 09:10, 8 May 2008 (UTC)


 * How about if we just drop the last part of the sentence? Then we have The Motion Picture Association of America filed a lawsuit in February 2006 against TorrentSpy for facilitating copyright infringement.. Andareed (talk) 18:27, 8 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, I think that is better. Will you make the change? Kricke (talk) 09:20, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Clarification
Was TorrentSpy a indexing site only or did they have a bittorrent tracker? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.178.154.91 (talk) 22:20, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

^^

TorrentSpy was an indexing site only. It was dissimilar to sites such as torrentz.com or google.com in that it did not employ an engine to search tracking sites. Users uploaded torrents directly to TorrentSpy to be stored on their servers, but the tracking etc. occurred exclusively on the trackers referenced in those torrents (e.g. PirateBay or Demonoid). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.9.175.15 (talk) 06:29, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Blacklisted Links Found on the Main Page
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External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 2 one external links on TorrentSpy. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20070611154957/http://torrentfreak.com:80/torrentspy-ordered-to-spy-on-its-users-on-behalf-of-the-mpaa/ to http://torrentfreak.com/torrentspy-ordered-to-spy-on-its-users-on-behalf-of-the-mpaa/
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20100731084212/http://www.wired.com:80/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/10/p2p_hacker to http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/10/p2p_hacker

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Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 11:26, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Past 2008
I understand that TorrentSpy now, +13 years later, has only "historic" relevance at best. I remember it used to be popular in the past.

Anyway - the article currently has "Whether the MPAA will collect the $110 million from TorrentSpy remains to be seen.". I assume this is from 2008, so perhaps someone could update the main article? Assumingly MPAA did not gain a lot of money, so the article should perhaps not leave it open as if $110 million were collected. On a side note, perhaps it may be useful to add, if someone knows, what happened afterwards with the folks who kept TorrentSpy running. Did they all become inactive? We have more information on what happened with napster than TorrentSpy. 2A02:8388:1604:F600:3AD5:47FF:FE18:CC7F (talk) 18:22, 14 June 2021 (UTC)