TorrentSpy

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**TorrentSpy**

URL	http://www.torrentspy.com/
Type of site	Torrent index
Registration	Free
Owner
Created by

TorrentSpy is a popular BitTorrent indexing Web Site. It hosts torrent files (which are tracked externally) and provides a forum to comment on them, as well as a graphical portrayal of how "healthy" the torrents are. It also integrates Digg-like user-driven content site ShoutWire's feed into its front page. As of early November 2006, the site has over 447,981 user submitted torrents indexed, and has over one million users. On average, there are 800 new torrents indexed every day.

1 TorrentSpy Rufus
2 Legal
3 TorrentSpy the Index versus TorrentSpy the Application
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] TorrentSpy Rufus

In November 2005, TorrentSpy released "TorrentSpy Rufus", an adware-bundled version of the open-source BitTorrent client Rufus. [1] This release was not authorized by the lead developer of Rufus. [2]

[edit] Legal

In May 2005, the site was forced to remove all links to torrents of Star Wars: Episode III after a stolen workprint of the film was leaked to the internet.

In July 2005, searches for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas were blocked "due to the request of the copyright holder, in compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA")". This limitation has since been removed [3]. However, the ability for a copyright holder to request the blockage of a particular search query remains.

In February 2006, the MPAA filed lawsuits against Torrentspy, isoHunt, and others for "abusing technology to facilitate infringement of copyrighted works."

In March 2006, the site layout went through some changes, each category of a particular TV show were removed and also movie categories were radically changed and merged together under a Video section. The forum administrators have only explained that the categories have changed, but not why.

[edit] TorrentSpy the Index versus TorrentSpy the Application

Shortly before the TorrentSpy.com domain name was registered in September of 2003, there was another TorrentSpy, also related to BitTorrent. This TorrentSpy was an Open-source software application for the Microsoft Windows platform, originally written in March of 2003 in Perl, but quickly rewritten in Delphi and released (BACON)for general use the following April. Regular updates to the application were released until January 2004 when the author considered the application to be "feature complete" and discontinued development.

The application was written to provide a more comprehensive listing of the attributes for .torrent files, as the BitTorrent GUI interfaces at the time were still very primitive. It also was the first application to use the "scrape" functionality that most BitTorrent trackers published to show the current active user count for each torrent. Most of the application's features were integrated into BitTorrent clients over time and are now considered to be required by most BitTorrent users.

It is not known if the TorrentSpy.com index owners were aware of the previous use of the name at the time they registered the domain.