The BitTorrent hub LokiTorrent has been shut down by a lawsuit from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), with the eight-hour outage earlier today turning out to be the prelude to a closure. The site came back online briefly with BitTorrent-related content, but within hours that had been replaced by a notice from the MPAA.

"There are websites that provide legal downloads. This is not one of them," reads the new front page of lokitorrent.com. "This website has been permanently shut down by court order because it facilitates the illegal downloading of copyrighted motion pictures." An MPAA press release said LokiTorrent operator Edward Webber agreed to pay "a substantial settlement with even greater financial penalties for any further such actions," and was under court order to provide the MPAA with logs and server data.

LokiTorrent had been among the most visible portals supporting BitTorrent, the popular distributed file-serving technology developed by Bram Cohen. Two other torrent hubs, SuprNova.org and TorrentBits.org shut down in December, shortly after the MPAA began filing lawsuits against sites supporting BitTorrent. LokiTorrent announced that it would fight the MPAA lawsuit, and raised more than $25,000 in user donations prior to seeking sale offers on the domain auction site Sedo. Statistics at Sedo show the site had been averaging 185,000 visitors per day over the last three weeks.