Title: Torrentz Has Died, But It Won’t Take Torrenting With It | WIRED
Headings: Torrentz Has Died, But It Won’t Take Torrenting With It
Torrentz Has Died, But It Won’t Take Torrenting With It
Everyone's favorite torrent search engine has closed shop. The next won't be far behind.

Content: That made it a major presence not just within the torrenting community, but on the Internet at large; before it shut down, it was 186 on web-ranking service Alexa, putting it ahead of sites like Weather.com and Flickr. So what happened? WIRED's attempts to reach Torrentz's operator, who goes by the handle “Flippy” on the site, have been so far unsuccessful, though he (or she! it's unclear) did reportedly tell torrent-tracking site TorrentFreak that he would not be commenting further. For one thing, it doesn’t seem to be the result of direct legal action. And Torrentz’s role as a search engine presumably gave it legal cover, since it did not host or directly enable the exchange of files. And while Torrentz had received scrutiny from the MPAA and RIAA in the past it complied with DMCA takedown requests by removing links to pirated content. That’s a far different model from KAT. When KAT founder Artem Vaulin was arrested in mid-July, the criminal complaint alleged that KAT cost copyright holders millions of dollars by not only enabling free downloads of first-run movies, but also by being unresponsive to legitimate DMCA takedown requests.