The decision came unannounced, unexpected and maybe unavoidable considering how the latest events evolved: TNT Village has shut down for good, and the Italian-speaking users of file sharing have now one less forum where to freely share and download copyright-protected contents. TNT Village’s closing seemingly was decided by Luigi Di Liberto himself, original creator of the portal and the related Associazione Scambio Etico, but now the copyright organizations are triumphantly talking about surrender after their legal action against Di Liberto. And TNT Village will perhaps return, in the future, in a different form. But no one will care anymore.

The situation is still confusing, versions are conflicting and TNT Village’s closing is the only really unquestionable fact: the forum ceased to exist at the beginning of September, when a message by the admins appeared on the homepage announcing the shutdown as a direct consequence of a decision by the founder Di Liberto. TNT Village’s page still hosts a link to download an archive with the releases updated till the end of August 2019, a document already put to use by some third party sites to try and set up some possible – albeit useless – clones of the original forum.

The truth is that TNT Village had been dying for years, you just had to try and visit the site on a daily basis to realize that it became an unsustainable venture devoid of energy: in these past years TNT Village was know for its ongoing technical difficulties rather than for the sharing work by releasers, and the lawsuit filed against Di Liberto in 2018 certainly was the proverbial last straw for the entire affair.

For many users myself included, TNT Village was long since replaced as the primary source for downloading and sharing films, TV series and any other kind of digital content on BitTorrent, and it’s rather surprising to learn that AIE (Associazione Italiana Editori) and FAPAV (Federazione per la Tutela dei Contenuti Audiovisivi e Multimediali) view the forum closing as a “great result” for the copyright industry. FAPAV states that the shutdown of TNT Village would be the result of an order coming from the Court of Milan, as a complete endorsement of the censorship demands that came from the copyright owners.

While announcing the end of TNT Village on Facebook, Di Liberto had talked about a “pause” for the Associazione Scambio Etico sharing activities while waiting for a new platform to open by May 2020, a position seemingly conflicting with the version provided by FAPAV. Maybe Di Liberto preceded the decision by Milan’s judge, but in the end who is responsible for what doesn’t matter anymore: TNT Village is dead, the old “king” of Italian file sharing has been finally put aside and the future ventures by Di Liberto (who meanwhile tried politics with the Pirate Party during the latest European elections) don’t seem much interesting from a P2P user’s perspective.

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