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takyon writes:

TorrentFreak reports that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has taken credit for recent shutdowns of torrent sites YTS and PopcornTime.io:

The major movie studios of the MPAA are behind the recent shutdown of the torrent site YTS, the associated release group YIFY, and the main Popcorn Time fork, PopcornTime.io. In an international effort spanning Canada and New Zealand, visits were carried out at the premises of at least two key suspects.

[...] The main Popcorn Time fork operating from the PopcornTime.io domain name closed its doors on October 23, citing internal issues. Part of the trouble was started by rumors of legal pressure, which the MPAA confirmed today.

The major movie studios have sued three Popcorn Time developers in Canada, the group announced in an official statement. The MPAA obtained an injunction on October 16 ordering the shutdown of the Popcorntime.io site. The complaint accuses the developers of various copyright infringing acts and also lists the VPN provider VPN.ht, which was operated by two of the Popcorn Time developers.

[...] The legal action in Canada was not an isolated incident, however. Around the same time, movie industry representatives targeted the operator of YTS/YIFY who's a New Zealand resident. The movie industry representatives had a warrant and threatened a multi-million dollar lawsuit, urging the operator to cooperate. YTS went dark two weeks ago as a result of the legal trouble and is not coming back.

But that's not all:

The MPAA initiated shutdown of YTS and associated release group YIFY will have an even larger impact on the torrent ecosystem than many people expected. The group is also the operator of the largest public tracker, Demonii, which will shut down soon.

A few hours ago the MPAA took credit for shutting down one of the biggest piracy icons in recent history. The YIFY release group and the YTS website shut down facing a multi-million dollar lawsuit, which the New Zealand-based operator couldn't fight.

[...] What only a few people know is that in recent years Demonii was run by YIFY's operator. As a result of the legal troubles with the movie studios, Demonii will soon go offline as well, bringing down another key player. With over 40 million people connected at any given time during the day, Demonii is currently the largest torrent tracker. At the time of writing Demonii still serves torrents to 41,622,554 peers, which translates to well over a billion connections per day. Impressive numbers that will soon become history.

Even without Demonii most torrents will still work fine, thanks to DHT and PEX, but the initial connections will take more time. This can slow down download times for many people. Trackers are also essential for those who use proxies, as they often have DHT and PEX disabled to prevent their real IP-addresses from leaking out.

With Demonii, YTS and YIFY gone there's no doubt that the torrent ecosystem has lost several big players. However, history has also shown that these are never mourned for long. It may be hard for other tracker to pick up Demonii's load without increasing their capacity. But there are plenty of alternatives still around to fill the gap and more are expected to rise because of it.

Update: Found a New YTS / YIFY Site? It's a FAKE
MPAA Can Access Popcorn Time Services & VPN, Court Rules

Original Submission