At least 51 torrent sites have been taken down this month thanks to joint efforts by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its dutch counterpart BREIN—12 in the US and 39 in the Netherlands. The two groups say they were able to work with the sites' hosting providers to take them offline, though the names of the affected sites have not been released.

According to BREIN, the torrent sites in question published links to copyrighted movies, leading it and the MPAA to send copyright infringement letters to the sites' hosts. In addition to the 51 sites knocked offline this month, BREIN also claims to have taken down 29 in the Netherlands last year.

The organizations say that this brings the total sum of sites taken offline to 665, but TorrentFreak believes the number is actually more than 1,000. TorrentFreak also argues that the torrent sites must have been small-time deals, as the Internet has barely noticed their absence and no one has reported any of the major sites being inaccessible.

The announcement comes just a day after Google stopped autocompleting searches for certain torrent-related keywords. Sites like BitTorrent, RapidShare, uTorrent, and others can only be found if users already know their full names, though other sites like The Pirate Bay are still autocompleted by the search engine. The move is part of Google's previously outlined effort to cut down on copyright infringement, though critics argue that Google is merely working in the interest of Big Content.

As for why the sites aren't being named, BREIN director Tim Kuik explained that it's meant to keep them from being found (by P2P users) elsewhere if they pop up under new domains. "New sites are popping up, but we take these down faster and faster so they can’t gain an audience,” Kuik said in a statement posted to BREIN's Dutch-language website. "Our goal is to limit the availability of illegal sites so people rather use legal platforms. BREIN doesn’t publish any names because some sites relocate and start over elsewhere."

The MPAA has not gloated about the latest takedowns and did not respond to our request for comment by publication time. However, the group has long been working to take P2P sites down, and has a history of working with international copyright groups. The MPAA's past victories haven't made much of a dent in BitTorrent use, though, and has even given some free publicity to torrent sites that end up being the focus of litigation.

Maybe it makes sense that BREIN would withhold the torrent sites' names after all.