The recent attack on the file sharing world, seems to have caused the loss of yet another site to the efforts of those against free file-sharing and communication. These would have to be the two popular torrent sites, BitTorrent and BTJunkie. Although this would appear to be tied to the recent take down of the giant file-sharing website MegaUpload, there are actually one or two key differences between these cases.

The first and probably most important being the fact that these two sites have shut down voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by the Feds. Going to the BTJunkie website brings up nothing more than a small goodbye page with a few short sentences. In it, they hardly give us any information at all and just state that they are shutting down and doing it at their own will.

Both Sites Shut Down At Their Own Will; Weren’t Forced by Government To Do So

BTJunkie was founded in 2005 and even though it is a relatively young age for a torrent file-sharing site, it quickly rose to a pretty substantial amount of popularity among torrent-users. BTJunkie also differs from MegaUpload in the sense that in MU, the files were taken directly off of MegaUpload servers, so they were actually hosting the content.

Those that are familiar with the world of torrents will know that sites like BitTorrent and BTJunkie don’t host the files. Instead, each of the users downloading the file do and downloading a file could mean a connection to hundreds of simultaneous downloaders. You can think of the file that is being downloaded from the site as a “recipe” to get the multimedia file you’re looking for.

Even though this still leaves us with The Pirate Bay, this recent closing of one of the few remaining torrent sites does have some pretty frightening implications. With BitTorrent and BTJunkie closing shop on their own, one does have to wonder how many (if any at all) sites will pop up to replace it or whether we’re witnessing the gradual death of file-sharing.