Torrent Site H33T Goes Offline Following Court Order

TorrentFreak reports that torrent site H33T has gone offline after encountering legal issues with its domain name registration. The domain name registrar for H33T removed all nameservers making the domain name useless according to H33T’s host Leaseweb. The registrar was served a court order because H33T apparently failed to remove certain copyrighted files. H33T says it hopes to be back up as soon as possible for business as usual.

“We asked our registrar why we cannot add the nameservers of LeaseWeb to your account. They informed us that they regretfully forced to temporarily disable the domain name due to receipt of a court order as the registrant had not reacted upon a request to remove certain files/entries from his service.” Stated Leaseweb support to H33T.

H33T’s owner is apparently very unhappy with the situation as the site has been effectively taken offline without any prior notice. H33T claim no DMCA notification was filed to them about any offending files and no legal correspondence was sent. H33T has a DMCA style take down procedure but it charges a $50 administration fee for each request and very often rejects requests because it operates outside U.S jurisdiction.

While H33T is technically down the site’s servers are still technically up and running but are rendered pretty useless without any domain names to pointing people towards them.

H33T say they expect to come back online very soon under a new domain, H33T.eu:

“H33t.eu is firing up now and will be fully live within 24 hours as soon as the DNS changes propagate to your locale. The regular h33t tracker is also firing up on the new eu domain announce.”

Image courtesy of H33T