H33T Is Down: Replacement URL Means Filesharing Site Likely To Return Under New Domain

The popular torrent tracking website H33T.com was taken down on Friday by its domain registrar, apparently due to a court order over a copyright dispute.

Leaseweb, the service provider tasked with hosting the file-sharing community’s domain name, said the site’s domain had been “temporarily” disabled “due to receipt of a court order,” according to P2P news site TorrentFreak. The file-sharing site is down as of Saturday morning EDT, but a replacement URL is live.

Update 9/28: The replacement URL is down as well. A copyright claim over Robin Thicke's new album "Blurred Lines" was the reason behind H33T's earlier demise.

Leaseweb, a Dutch company that manages H33T’s URL, and it appears that a copyright holder requested that the site be disabled for failing to comply with a takedown request. H33T’s administrators originally charged copyright holders $50 to take down a torrent.

The new site -- located at H33T.eu, does not currently have any functionality, other than displaying the following message:

If you are seeing this message then you have found the new .eu domain

The h33t tracker is also online. add the new announce [sic] to your torrents to keep them alive udp://fr33domtracker.h33t.eu:3310/announce

Thank you for your patience, it will be business as usual very shortly, enjoy the h33t

Update: As of Sunday, Sept. 8, the new H33T URL now hosts torrent files similarly to the former site.

Leaseweb originally hosted file-sharing site Megaupload, run by Kim Dotcom, before being issued a takedown notice and eventually terminating the site. The company has been criticized by Dotcom for eventually wiping MegaUpload data that existed before the site was shut down.

Another popular peer-to-peer torrent site, KickassTorrents (KAT.PH), went down earlier this year following a domain seizure, only to return with a new URL (Kickass.to).

An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to Leaseweb as a Norwegian company.

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