Fenopy, one of the older torrent sites that's been around for nearly nine years, has shut down voluntarily. The closure marks the end of what once was described as the first "web 2.0" torrent site.

A few days ago Fenopy.se stopped responding, leaving tens of thousands of regular users without one of their favorite torrent sites.

The downtime wasn’t related to Pirate Bay’s troubles. Instead, the site’s domain name had simply expired.

TF talked to Fenopy’s owner who says that the expiration was not an accident, but planned a long time ago. The site’s owner decided that it was time to move on, and let the site vanish.

“Fenopy was being operated by an Artificial Intelligence that I created back in 2011 and was on autopilot during the past 2 years. The domain just expired few days ago.” he says.

Fenopy gained a lot of visitors in 2006 when it was the first full-fledged torrent site with a “modern” looking design and nifty web 2.0 features.

In recent years the site’s traffic went down considerably, not in the last place because of various ISP blockades.

The owner of Fenopy gave us the following statement which is food for thought, discussion, and much more.

—

On Liberty of Knowledge:

I wanted to talk about the values of sharing in this statement.

But shame on us. For taking the greatest invention of our era, The Internet, and turn it into a marketing and surveillance web; all for feeding our greed and controlling the information.

Inside every artist, scientist, priest, student, politician and every man, is a will. Will to be heard and be remembered. From the dawn of time, we shared and reasoned our perceptions of our surroundings with one another. We documented them in inscriptions, fables, and books. Gathered them in our most sacred places; from Hanging Gardens of Babylon to Library of Alexandria. So everyone could access the knowledge of us freely to grow out of nonage.

The Internet could become our global library of knowledge. The path was by giving every information to everyone for the sake of giving. What we saw was an Internet owned and operated by enterprises. We need enterprises, but we also need to realize that each enterprise function to protect self-interests and profits. So we decided to guard the knowledge and reveal it; allowing everyone access, without forcing them to go through guardians who would conceal it. We made mistakes too, but at least we tried.

Power heard and acknowledged. It forced my brothers at The Pirate Bay to exile from their fatherlands. They found love and friendship in the people of the new lands.

Our brothers – Aaron, Gottfrid, Fredrik, and Peter – have fulfilled their mission. They sacrificed their freedom to fight the greed while living a modest life in prisons and remote corners of our world.

They are the heroes of our generation, the martyrs of the digital era, the liberators of our knowledge in art, science, and humanities. They broke the constructs of ownership and freed themselves even from their lands. Like all of us, they made mistakes too; yet they fought for a human reason.

May the death of these websites, the libraries of our modern age, be a lesson for future generations, that path to liberty starts with courage.

I finish this eulogy with Immanuel Kant:

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) “Have the courage to use your own understanding,” is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.”

This, once liberated us from Dark Ages in Europe. Hope it will liberate all of us again.

With peace

Breathe in union