Legal issues
In a 2007 study, Slyck.com found twelve cease and desist letters to users of Demonoid.
On September 25, 2007, the Demonoid website, forums and trackers went offline.They came back four days later with the exception of the website, which came back the day after. Over the next few days, the website continued experiencing intermittent downtime until October 2, 2007. The explanation as widely speculated was that they had received a letter from a lawyer for the Canadian Recording Industry Association threatening legal action. Demonoid began blocking Canadian traffic, a strategy similar to that taken by isoHunt and TorrentSpy in blocking American traffic to avoid RIAA complaints. Visitors from Canadian-based IPs would be redirected to the downtime version of the website, which contained an explanation of the legal threats. However, it was still possible for Canadians to visit the website at that time using proxy servers. Additionally, while the website may have been blocked in Canada at the time, the tracker was still readily accepting Canadian IP addresses.
The threats are in spite of the open question of the legality of music file sharing in Canada.The CRIA has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement despite Demonoid's claims.
On November 9, 2007, the site again went offline, reportedly due to legal threats to their service provider from the Canadian Recording Industry Association. A placeholder page stated, "The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding." According to the IRC channel, the trackers themselves were not affected.
Six days later, the placeholder page was updated with a link to a new forum, unrelated to file sharing, for the community. On November 29, 2007, Deimos posted on that forum a problem preventing the site from coming back up:
"Money is an issue, but the real problem at the moment is finding a suitable place to host the website. There has been no luck there. And there's some personal stuff I need to take care of that takes most of my time at the moment, and that does not help."
The site then came back online on April 11, 2008. The homepage announced that the site had a new administrator, and that the old one (Deimos) had left for personal reasons.
In November 2013, demonoid.me and demonoid.ph started redirecting to demonoid.com, whose website began displaying a page that hints at a possible comeback of the site, with the message "We will rebuild! Coming back soon, please check back later. Thanks for your visit!!" along with a Bitcoin donation link.[29] On January 9, 2014, a tracker came online at inferno.demonoid.com and quickly became one of the five busiest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet; in only a few hours, the tracker was coordinating the communication of 1.3 million people scattered across 388,321 torrent files
- Include this info file inside the torrent (Just left click the link, it will prompt you to save the file automatically)
- This is a simple text file that says this torrent is tracked by demonoid. If you fail to add this to your torrent, then the site will reject it.
- No adult material allowed
- Demonoid has a strict policy against pornographic material. Any content depicting a sexual act will be deleted. There are countless sources to distribute this type of material and Demonoid is not one of them.
- No spam (make quick money / Win an iPod / online poker / pyramid schemes, etc.)
- Get rich quick schemes, money pyramids, free stuff and the likes do not benefit anyone. Torrents such as these will be deleted on sight.
- No hate inducing material of any kind.
- No passworded archives.
- Passworded archives (. rar, .zip, .ace, .tar, .7z, etc.) are not allowed. Forcing people to go to other site to acquire a password is a nuisance on the community. Torrents which are reported for violating this rule are immediately deleted.
- No torrents from private trackers
- Torrents from trackers that require registration on a site to download are not allowed.
- No duplicate material
- Please search before uploading to check if the material is already on the site
- No trojans or virus infected archives
- No infected torrents are allowed. Torrents infected with trojans, virii, adware, spyware, malware, etc. will be deleted.
- No hacking tools (reading material related to this subject is ok)
- Try to make sure your torrents are well-seeded for at least 24 hours or until there are some seeds to replace you
