August 10, 2016:Â Just days after popular meta-search engineTorrentz.eu had officially shut down, a new clone in the form of Torrentz2.eu is continuing the legacy of the original website. The closure of Torrentz.eu came within a month after the alleged owner of piracy websiteKickassTorrents Artem Vaulin was arrested following the shutdown of the website.
Last week, Torrentz.eu had silently shut shop with the message to its visitors: “Torrentz will always love you. Farewell”. The owner of the website reportedly refused to comment over the reason.
Founded in 2003, Torrentz was among the oldest and the most popular platform to look out for torrent files. The torrent hosting site later expanded to become a meta-search engine. Torrentz also provided an option to allow people with copyright to certain content to file a cease and desist complain.
It seems that the decision to shut down was mainly taken due to legal pressure on piracy websites after the KickassTorrents crackdown. Another website, Solarmovie, also gave up fearing legal action.
With just a day after KickassTorrents was taken down by authorities, clone websites of KickassTorrents were back online. One of the popular clones dubbed as KAT.am, claimed that its website is “hosted on multiple cloud servers to prevent blockade, and the hosting information is well hidden behind Cloudflare.”
KAT, which distributes films, video games, television programs, music and other electronic media, was estimated to be the 69th-most frequently visited website on the internet, according to a US Justice Department statement.
Despite the makers of the clone website claiming to be “full-proof”, authorities had successfully taken down the KAT.am clone website as well a week later.
