BitTorrents Empornium, PureTNA Close Permanently

CYBERSPACE—A couple of huge BitTorrent porn sites have bitten the dust. Empornium and PureTNA, which are managed by Breeze and account for a combined 2.5 million members, have closed their doors permanently, according to TorrentFreak. “To give an idea of size,” reported the site, “PureTNA had in excess of 1,329,500 members, Empornium a similar number. At last count PureTNA’s database sat at nearly 67,000 torrents servicing around 630,000 peers. Empornium listed more than 82,000 torrents and 660,000 peers. That’s a hell of a lot of filth and depravity, just how their members liked it.” Torrent Freak received confirmation from Breeze that the sites were permanently closed and was given as cause, “Such is bittorrent life.” The vague explanation led TorrentFreak to list a few additional rumors for why the sites were shuttered. “The main unconfirmed rumor to have gained traction is that due to a lack of investment in code development, both sites have been vulnerable to malicious attacks,” wrote enigmax. “This resulted in one or both of the sites being hacked in recent days. Rather than pump money into the sites to prevent this happening again, their hard drives were wiped by the sites’ owners to protect user privacy, or so the story goes.” The second rumor has to do with increased legal pressure being brought against BitTorrent sites by adult producers, directly by means of massive John Doe lawsuits and also by other less direct methods. “As can be seen from a list retrievable via Google cache which was updated only last week, dozens of porn sites and studios have issued some kind of legal “do not upload” orders to the sites,” TorrentFreak reported. The author of the article also mused that the closure of the sites has probably resulted in “triumphant gloating” by some in the adult industry. That is very possible, but if so it might be short-lived gloating. The operators of Empornium and PureTNA were reportedly spotted at one of the AVN shows (AEE, Internext, ANE, AVN Awards) taking place in Las Vegas last week. Probably a coincidence.