Hot on the heels of service restrictions or shutdown announcements by file hosting services in the wake of the US federal government’s shutdown of file host giant Megaupload, popular index site BTJunkie has announced that it will be shutting down. BTJunkie is an index site used for file-sharing. The site announced this past Monday its voluntary shutdown.
Announcing the decision, the site posted a short message on its homepage: “This is the end of the line my friends.” The site also included its years of operation: “2005-2012.” The site explained: “The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!” the site concluded.
According to file-sharing news resource TorrentFreak, BTJunkie was one of the five biggest torrent indexing sites on the Internet. TorrentFreak estimates that the site serviced “dozens of millions of users a month.” BTJunkie lists available torrents and users from all over the world will download the torrent file to share the file through the global peer to peer torrent network. In effect, BTJunkie acted as a search engine for all types of torrent files.
TorrentFreak noted that the founder of BTJunkie admitted that the decision to shut down the site was due partly to the recent wave of legal actions involving The Pirate Bay and Megaupload. Megaupload’s founder and main principal Kim Dotcom is currently incarcerated in New Zealand awaiting extradition proceedings to the United States where he is charged with intellectual property offenses and other crimes. Besides DotCom seven other people were charged in the case. The Pirate Bay is recently facing legal action in Europe.
BTJunkie joins FileSonic and other file-sharing related sites which have either shutdown completely or severely limited their link and file sharing capabilities in light of the recent Megaupload and Pirate Bay legal developments. Other file sharing sites, even though they did not shut down or curtail operations, have reiterated their “data locker” business model and have substantially distanced themselves from the “get paid to upload” business model that big file hots like Megaupload used to feature.