There’s a bit of a scare going around the BitTorrent community today, with word that the Canadian Recording Industry Association has “ordered” the closure of several popular trackers, including What.cd. The CRIA has told Moxie Colo, which hosts the trackers in question, to take the offending sites down, issuing cease and desists like they’re going out of style. For its part, the hosting comapny says it has no plans to comply with the CRIA’s demands:
We will not be following the request and will be fighting for the rights of our clients as to date laws in Canada protect them.
A similar note was posted in the What.cd’s forum:
I doubt the sites in question are going to move off of moxie as we are standing here in public eye backing them up. If they want to leave then in end of day makes our life easier but by no means are we saying them or any other client needs to vacate. We will take this all the way to the courts before we would ever damage our relations with our clients.
Please everyone understand that we are not shutting down anyone anytime soon.
Hopefully What.cd doesn’t go the way of OiNK.
We have been expecting such actions against what.cd since day one. We are not worried about this and have been prepared the entire time. If a court forces moxie to take us offline then we are ready to host elsewhere. We have better hardware than we currently run on sitting on standby to host elsewhere if that day comes as well as secure backups. We have no intention on fleeing Canada or moxie and give this one to CRIA but rest assured in the case we are forced to we have great redundancy and we will not be another dead tracker.