After being spammed with takedown request from several companies, ELiTE-TEAM, a French private BitTorrent tracker recently asked several torrent indexers to remove their torrents, and not to accept any new ones. Unfortunately their effort is doomed to fail.

In an email, sent to several of the bigger torrent sites, the administrator of ELiTE-TEAM writes:

“Lately we received more complaints from anti-piracy organizations on behalf of major companies, because some of our members post our torrents on your indexer. I take the freedom of you ask whether it is possible to remove all torrents related to my tracker, and not to accept new ones in the future.”

The administrator had already asked the members of his tracker not to post their torrents elsewhere, but this didn’t work out, as he writes: “We already put announcements on the tracker, but our +120,000 are not very co-operative.”

Most BitTorrent sites owners are more than familiar with handling takedown requests, however, these usually come from copyright holders or anti-piracy organizations, not fellow site admins.

Other than that, it is of course impossible to prevent torrents from being shared, since it is the whole purpose of filesharing. The only option to prevent people from spreading ELiTE-TEAM torrents is to take down the tracker.

ELiTE-TEAM, on the other hand, is simply trying to stay out the firing range of anti-piracy organization by showing that they are willing to cooperate with content owners. They even posted the takedown requests and removal logs on their disclaimer page. However, I doubt that sending takedown request to torrent indexers is the optimal solution.