Legal non-piracy Torrents site announces it will shut down after 17 years

Legit Torrents announced its shutdown on Friday (21). Known as a kind of “good” share, the site only offered free downloads of legitimate files. After nearly 17 years of operation, the platform hosted more than 5,000 torrents, but after encountering some technical problems, its founder Dustin Montgomery decided to stop.

“The server was zero-routed on the host, and I decided to throw in the towel without the time and click to spin it back up. The rest is a fun point of view,” he summed up. When it launched the site in the fall of 2005 on a free dyndns.org subdomain, the torrent scene was dominated by TorrentSpy and Mininova, both of which provide pirated content.

In his closing post on the site, Montgomery explains that he realized while still in high school that “there is no 100% legal torrent tracker that anyone can easily access.” I made some money with adsense and bought his own domain – legittorrents.info – for $0.99.

Why was Legal Torrents shut down?

While it might seem more or less logical that Legit Torrents should have a long lifespan to only share allowed content, that doesn’t mean the site isn’t in legal trouble. Several copyright holders mistakenly accused the site of content violations.

Representatives of the MMORPG game in 2007 Warlords sued the site for a kung fu movie of the same name. Lately, server IP address redirected to spam or host malwareSeems to be “the last straw” for Montgomery.

Now a family man, Montgomery has new responsibilities and has chosen to take other paths. “It is not easy to say goodbye to this stupid site. It’s been a part of my entire adult life. For nearly 17 years he has always been there for me to control, supervise and take care of.” he finished.