BTjunkie, one of the largest bittorrent indexing sites on the internet, shut its doors today due presumably to ever-increasing pressure from national governments all over the world.

The site has been in the top-10 most popular bittorrent sites in the world since 2008, and recently carried out an anti-SOPA campaign with its homepage – like several sites, utilizing a service that could connect your cell phone directly with your senator or representative’s office.  Because of this popularity, it was probably used primarily for piracy, even though it definitely had a large catalog of valid, open-source or otherwise legal torrents indexed as well.

Yesterday, you could use it to download almost anything. Today, there’s nothing on the page but a short goodbye message and a brief explanation that “it’s time to move on”. Note that it wasn’t taken down by any authorities, but this was a voluntary end to the game.

Have you ever used BTJunkie? If so, what will you do now? Will you move to another torrent site? If you used it for piracy, will you consider recent improvements in some software markets with online downloads and purchase legitimate software?

I suppose it should be known that I’m a sympathizer of most forms of online piracy, however I have in recent years started using online marketplaces like Steam, or sticking to free software whenever possible. But that doesn’t change the fact that I believe that many governments’ and agencies’ ideas about it are flawed.