In recent years Coppersurfer.tk has quickly become one of the most used BitTorrent trackers.
Running on the beerware-licensed Opentracker software, the standalone tracker offers a non-commercial service which doesn’t host or link to torrent files themselves.
The free service coordinates the downloads of 10 million people at any given point in time, processing roughly billions of connections per month.
However, since last weekend Coppersurfer.tk has been offline. Responding to a complaint from Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, hosting provider LeaseWeb suddenly pulled the plug.
According to a LeaseWeb rep “torrents are illegal” and the company had no other option than to shut down the tracker.
This came as quite a surprise to the operator, since his service doesn’t link to or host torrent files. In fact, Coppersurfer doesn’t know what titles are tracked or where all the corresponding torrents are stored.