- The recent snitching action of YTS has resulted in widespread condemnation from the pirating community.
- Torrent indexing platform ‘1337x’, which is the third most popular in the world, has banned all YTS uploads.
- EZTV was banned shortly after, as a link between the two was subsequently confirmed beyond doubt.
A few days back, disclosed court documents involved YTS in a large-scale pirate identification operation carried out by filmmakers who are seen in the pirating community as “copyright trolls.” YTS was in legal trouble again, and to escape the worst of the possible consequences, they just shared the IP addresses, emails, and whatever else they had on the users who downloaded the movies “Rambo: Last Blood” and “Hellboy.”
Some saw this as a betrayal of YTS towards its userbase and the pirating community in general. So, ‘1337x’ is the first to do something to express their opposition to what happened.
The torrent indexer, which also happens to be one of the largest and most successful torrent sites in the world, has banned all YTS uploads on its platform. The site didn’t even bother to issue a warning or an announcement about the ban, so they just blocked the YTS upload bots.
This translates to preventing hundreds of new torrents from being added on 1337x each week. The operators of the torrent indexing site told Torrent Freak that YTS has acted as a common snitcher and that the decision to ban them came from a unanimous vote from the staff.
Related: The YTS Platform Helped Copyright Holders Identify Pirates
Along with YTS, EZTV was also banned since it is considered to be linked to the YTS operators. When the YTS ban came into effect, the EZTV bot started uploading YTS torrents on 1337x, essentially acting as a backup system. The admins of 1337x added that they never trusted YTS and EZTV anyway, and they knew that they weren’t the original groups.
However, they previously allowed them to upload stuff on the website because they weren’t doing anything malicious like including malware in the torrents, and users loved the combination of good enough quality and small file size. After the recent events, though, 1337x doesn’t want to have any association with them.
YTS is indeed trying to play a double-platform game, facilitating piracy on the one side and paying their way out of trouble on the other. YTS is attempting to balance its act between making money from illegal operations and not getting shut down by copyright holders. That second part would be through the payment of settlements and also the sharing of user identification details. This is one sure way to lose people’s trust, as even those who are using a VPN tool to access YTS may now have ethical barriers in doing so.
Following 1337x’s ban, ‘TorrentGalaxy’ and ‘Glotorrents’ have also decided to block all YTS release uploads, and more platforms will likely do the same soon. Of course, there will always be the YTS website, but many already see this domain as a pirate honeypot.
