Leechers Paradise Quits After 12 Years of Torrent Tracking

• Leechers Paradise goes offline, leaving a significant gap in global torrent tracking
• Article 13 has seemingly pulled the carpet from under Leechers Paradise feet
• New EU legislation still unclear, causing uncertainty and fear to smaller players

Leechers Paradise website displays a “Goodbye to all” message, and the torrent tracking servers have gone offline for good. The owner, “Eddie”, states the reason to be Article 13 of the new EU copyright law.

Leechers Paradise was one of the largest torrent-tracking services in the world, serving millions of torrent sharing users every single day! Torrent tracking is a technical curating process that helps sort and coordinate peers and leeches, so a torrent becomes a harmonized swarm that uses people to share files. Most people ignore the very existence of torrent trackers since all they have to do in order to download media is to use a torrent indexer to find what they are looking for.

Torrent trackers though are still there, working hard behind the curtain to coordinate the torrent sharing process. The fact that no one has to visit these websites means that no ad revenue can be generated, so they are essentially a kind of “hobby projects”. Making money and risking with copyrighted material sharing is one thing, earning nothing and being in risk of going to jail is another.

Enter Article 13 of the new EU copyright law which obliges all online media entities to screen their users’ uploads and filter out all that is violating copyrighted content laws. This new directive has caused concern to giants like YouTube and Facebook who will now have to put a lot more effort in the screening process, but for websites and online services such as Leechers Paradise, this is just impossible. This is why Eddie decided to call it quits after 12 years, as the risk is simply not worth the gains. Surely, article 13 is unclear as to how services like torrent tracking will be affected, but Eddie is right to worry since obscure legal contexts are not known to favor torrent service owners in court.

Leechers Paradise was one big player in the global torrent tracking space, and the chances are that you have been served by its servers if you are into torrenting. With it gone, it doesn’t mean that torrent tracking will get to its knees as other large trackers are showing no signs of reluctance in continuing their activity. However, this was another big blow for the world of torrent sharing, with Leechers Paradise serving over six million IPV4 torrents and 132 million peers according to the latest stats.

Have you used Leechers Paradise before? Are you disappointed by its closure? Let us know in the comments below. Also, don’t forget to visit our Facebook and Twitter socials to learn more about what is going on in the tech industry.