“I could, theoretically, create a torrent of The Office and use tracker.newteevee.com as one of those 40. That doesn’t mean you have a tracking server running.. just that someone thinks you do.

We were probably widely known for running an open tracker server, among the torrent-trading underworld, back in 1995/6. And when we came back up in April of 2008, those torrents immediately glommed back onto our tracking server. But remember – just because you are listed as a tracking server address in a torrent is no guarantee that there’s a real server behind it.”

Are you disputing that you tracked those 22,000 torrents? The data from sites like BTMon is pretty clear in this case. Here’s a quick snapshot from one of the torrents in question:

“The.Chronicles.of.Narnia.Prince.Caspian.2008.Eng.TS.DivX-LTT.torrent – http://tracker.revision3.com:20000/announce
dls 1688, seeders 197, leechers 531, updated 1w ago.”

Now I’m not saying that you broke the law by helping to distribute those files – heck, for all I know this very file could be a Mediadefender decoy.

But the fact that you had a widely used open tracker with tens of thousands of torrents running undermines the argument that Mediadefender sneaked through a back door to wreak havoc. The door was wide open, and there already was a party going on inside.

Not to mention the questionable cognitive leap associated with determining that the actions of the second admin (the one intentionally violating federal law) are even an error in the first place. MediaTerrorist has never said the way their system functioned was an error, have they?

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This changed in April of this year, when we switched tracking server software to try to keep the tracker stable (the native Python-based bittorrent tracking server software had trouble with white lists composed of thousands of shows – which we have).

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At that point our tracker was open for five weeks, until a forum member alerted us to the fact that it was, in fact, providing index entries (or tracking – much like a search engine) lots of illegally shared files. So we shut it down and the rest of the mess ensued.

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Since we were up on Torrent since 2005, and since we were probably (I say probably because back when we were three guys in an apartment in LA, no one can really remember the details clearly) running an open tracker up until April of last year, our tracking server address became widely known… When you create a torrent, you can specify any tracking server address you like – up to 40. And a list of known open trackers comes along with most torrent creation software. I could, theoretically, create a torrent of The Office and use tracker.newteevee.com as one of those 40. That doesn’t mean you have a tracking server running.. just that someone thinks you do.

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We were probably widely known for running an open tracker server, among the torrent-trading underworld, back in 1995/6. And when we came back up in April of 2008, those torrents immediately glommed back onto our tracking server. But remember – just because you are listed as a tracking server address in a torrent is no guarantee that there’s a real server behind it.

Also remember that running a tracking server is not illegal. It’s like a search engine, it just provides pointers. Still, we’re much happier that we have a stable tracking server that’s locked to just our shows (it’s not even running at all now, due to the problems, but should be back soon).