The MPAA's recently announced campaign against websites hosting BitTorrent trackers seems to be paying its initial dividends: a few BT sites have shut down, including the relatively venerable Suprnova.org.

Some folks thought that Slovenia-based Suprnova would be immune, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Legal action isn't shutting these sites down, so jurisdiction is irrelevant. The threat of legal action is all that's required; some schmo from Slovenia is likely to be bankrupted just by going through the process of figuring out if the MPAA can come after him; if the answer turns out to be yes, he'd REALLY screwed. The only viable option is to fold up shop.

In fact, while it's obvious that these sites aren't operating in good faith, it's not clear that any of them are actually breaking the law. Since the INDUCE act failed to pass, the crucial distinction seems to be whether torrent sites can be considered "common carriers" -- clearinghouses of information for which the site's owners are not ultimately responsible. One of the most effective ways to find pirate torrents is Google, after all, and nobody's going after them.

Well, all that's a bit irrelevant, right? The question is where to go now when you find out your VCR didn't tape Lost. There are plenty of answers:

• There are still a lot of suprnova-style torrent sites that haven't yet succumbed to the MPAA's campaign, thanks either to their small size or a foolishly brazen appraisal of their legal liability. No one knows if they'll be able to tough it out, but for now TorrentSpy, FileList, EliteTorrents and The Pirate Bay are all still up.
• As always, IRC remains the internet's wild west, and torrent traffic seems to be retreating there. EFNet hosts the channels #bt and #bt-gm -- which conveniently provide web interfaces here and here so you can find what you want before wading into IRC. You'll need an IRC client, but from there you just need to hop on the network, join the channel, and type !rules or !triggers or whatever the welcome message tells you to. That should provide you with instructions for connecting to an FServe bot, from which you'll be able to download the torrent file. It sounds complicated, I know. I'll be honest: it sort of is. But only at first -- once you understand the system, it's not a bad one to navigate.
• Finally, there's the aforementioned Google. A particularly neat development is a little program called GTorrent. Behold the power of Slashdot! Someone posted an idea for the program at 2pm, and the idea was implemented and available online by midnight. Not bad. The program sends a google search for torrent files, then tries connecting to each returned result to see if the torrent is still active. Pretty slick, although it's Windows-only at the moment -- and you'll need the .NET environment installed (win2k and xp should already have this; downloads are available for 9x).

There are also some efforts underway to build BitTorrent clients that look more like traditional P2P apps -- Suprnova was working on such a system, called eXeem, although it's not clear if they'll continue to pursue it in light of their decision to shut their website's doors. I have doubts about this endeavor -- I think such a design mistakenly assumes that BitTorrent as a whole is suffering from the liabilities of a centralized architecture simply because individual torrents have a somewhat centralized nature. Creating a distributed system may seem like it would make the network harder to track down, but in practice it'll necessarily codify a specific port range and actually make it easier to locate and shut down BT traffic. On the other hand, technical merit frequently takes a back seat to novelty and stealth -- witness the uselessness of FreeNet versus the technically ho-hum but excellent-in-practice SoulSeek -- so if it's ever released, eXeem might be worth a look.