Its hard to find any good news in the Bittorrent community these days.  Between the sale of The Pirate Bay to the court ordered mass deletion of torrents on Mininova, it seems that nothing can go right for the popular P2P community.

With groups like the RIAA, MPAA, IFPI, BRIEN and countless others constantly harassing every bittorrent site they can find until they shut down, it is no surprise that the P2P scene is seeing some dark days.  I’m not saying this is the beginning of the end for bittorrent, but I do think that the actions of the past two months are going to change the community forever.

I predict that with the court ordered mass deletion of torrents on Mininova and the sale of The Pirate Bay (which will immediately be run straight into the ground), this is the end of massive torrent sites.  Numerous large trackers have been shut down over the past couple of years but these two are by far the biggest.  Generally speaking, the larger the torrent site, the bigger the target is on their back and the greater desire that the groups mentioned above have to shut them down.  I think in the future that the biggest torrent sites you will see are near that of the tracker Demonoid.

I believe that in the near future, we will see a number of new, smaller, torrent sites pop up to fill the void left by the larger trackers.  When I use bittorrent, I find that the more niche tracker I can find, the better the experience tends to be and I think that this is the trend that is about to get a big boost in the coming months.  Arguably, what made sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay great is their wide range of files, but that has also caused problems in that instead of having just one industry group after you, you have groups after you from a number of industries.  It is much easier to stay alive if you only have a few people chasing you rather than a mob of them.  The more niche that sites can be, the better experience users will have as well because it will be much easier to find what they are looking for with more seeds and less irrelevant stuff to sift through.

In the end, I think that the current events in the bittorrent community will work out for the best but it is going to be a tough road to get there and things will be much different than they have been in the past.  Here is to hoping that the mafia groups don’t win!