Over the years, we have reported the disappearance of hundreds of torrent sites. Many of them withdrew due to legal pressure.
This week another site bites the dust; one that has been around since 2005, when people like Torrent Spy and Mininova dominated the scene.
While those two giants would eventually succumb to legal pressure, Legit Torrents forged ahead. Unlike most others, this site specifically focused on content that No cause any problems with rights holders.
RIP legitimate torrents (2005 - 2023)
legitimate torrents it managed to flourish in its little niche for about 17 years, but has now decided to close. According to its founder and operator, Dustin Montgomeryrecent technical problems proved to be too much of a challenge.
The problem started when the server's IP address was routed as null to send spam or host malware. The action was the result of a larger IP address being blocked, making it impossible for the site's hosting provider to restore the server remotely.
Technically, it would have been possible to rebuild the server and the site, but after spending most of his life maintaining Legit Torrents, Dustin decided it was time to shut it down.
โI started Legit Torrents in the fall of 2005. I was still in high school and back then there was no 100% legal torrent tracker that anyone could easily send themselves to,โ he recalls in a farewell message posted to the site.
Millions of Views
Like many others at the time, Legit Torrents started out as a hobby project with minimal resources. Dustin recalls that he initially started with a free dyndns.org subdomain. When the traffic finally started pouring in, he made his first investment in the site by purchasing the name legittorrents.info for $0.99.
In the following years, the site registered approximately 50,000 users and hosted 5,500 torrents. With a few thousand page views a day, it certainly wasn't the most popular torrent site, but unlike many others, Legit Torrents survived, eventually reaching 22 million page views.
The site ran Adsense ads for a while to cover the bills. This worked fine until it was banned, not because of copyright issues, but because Legit Torrents signed up for an offer that later turned out to lead to fraudulent clicks.
Speaking with TorrentFreak, Dustin notes that at its peak in 2010, the site brought in over $1,000 for a few months. Admittedly though, that was partly due to the launch of the Pontiac Torrent car and some decent SEO skills.
'Legal issues
Having a legal torrent site does not mean the absence of legal challenges. Over the years, various rights holders mistakenly accused site for sharing copyright infringing material without permission.
In 2007, for example, the infamous Web Sheriff accused the site for sharing a pirated copy of the movie The Warlords, mistaking it for the free MMORPG kung fu game Warlords on the torrent site archive.
Dustin challenged several of these takedowns and also spent quite a few hours keeping spammers off the site, which wasn't always easy.
โI had spammers uploading torrents en masse for a long time. With the automatic approval of torrents, I spent a lot of time logging in to fight them,โ says Dustin.
Auto-approval could also be a problem when users inadvertently upload pirated content. In the end, Legit Torrents opted to manually approve users to post, to avoid potential issues.
definition of life
Looking back, Dustin is quite proud of what he accomplished. Offering a site that helped people get a copy of Linux, independent movie releases, game updates, or other software was very rewarding.
โMy best memories of the site are just having it useful,โ Dustin tells us, adding that he would get excited when he saw random strangers adding links to the index.
While working on the site, Dustin also helped himself move forward in life. Today, he works as an SEO consultant, and Legit Torrents was an informal education that turned out to be quite valuable. Interestingly, even The Pirate Bay played a small role in this process.
โI can't say enough how much I've learned running this site and others. Much better than a title in my opinion. It was one of my first exposures to implementing SEO, which was rather amusingly mostly tags copied from The Pirate Bay and modified to be about legal torrents instead."
Bye
With the closure of Legit Torrents, Dustin closes the book on an important chapter in his life. While these goodbyes are never easy, it's quite refreshing to see a positive ending.
The Legit Torrent founder has been blessed with a happy, healthy, and growing family, which is also one of the reasons he can do without a time-consuming project. That being said, letting go is easier than it seems.
โIt's not easy to say goodbye to this silly site. It has been a part of my entire adult life. For ~17 years, he was always there for me to control, moderate, and care,โ Dustin notes.
โIf you have ever used Legit Torrents, I sincerely hope it has helped you. My mission in life is to love Jesus and love others, and I think Legit Torrents did it in a weird, technological way."
