h33tEU
H33t, a popular P2P network that hosts torrent files, was taken down earlier this month due to a copyright claim over the illegal sharing of Robin Thicke album "Blurred Lines". H33t and its domain name registrar hope to have the temporary ruling that caused the shutdown overturned. H33t / H33t.eu

A second copyright claim from the German arm of the Universal Media Group has brought down the replacement URL hosting P2P website known as "h33t" at its replacement URL: h33t.eu. The site had moved to the new URL from its previous location, h33t.com, due to a previous complaint from Universal.

The complaints were made in a German court, where a judge ordered h33t's domain registrar to wipe the torrent site's nameservers from the domain records, according to a report from P2P weblog TorrentFreak. The original complaint from Universal resulted in a temporary injunction against h33t, and was over the album "Blurred Lines" from singer Robin Thicke, appearing on the site.

H33t gained notoriety in May of last year after the site's administrators began charging a $50 fee to copyright holders requesting takedowns of offending torrents "to cover reasonable administration expenses." Takedown requests are regulated by the DMCA, or Digital Millenium Copyright Act, a U.S. law that criminizes illegal file-sharing. Administrators from h33t claim that they do not operate the site within U.S. borders, and are therefore exempt from the law's jurisdiction. H33t administrators also claimed that the German court ordering its registrar to delete its URL was acting outside of its jurisdiction.

H33t is a popular file-sharing website that hosts torrents to allow for downloading of any kind of computer file, including copyrighted music (.mp3), films, software and even comic books. While not as popular as torrent-hosting alternatives like The Pirate Bay or KickAss Torrents, h33t has a dedicated following of self-proclaimed pirates throughout Europe and Asia. Torrent hosting has become a popular alternative to the P2P technology used by programs like Napster. Torrent files are used by programs like BitTorrent to locate and download parts of files from one to many different users.

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