Knock knock! Someone's at the door...

Depending on where one stresses the word “gamato” it can either mean “cool“, “ballsy“, “spunky” – or “fuck it“. Apparently, the latter is now in effect for Greek BitTorrent tracker, Gamato.info.

Greek police, acting on behalf of music and film entertainment organizations, have closed down Gamato.info and have arrested several of its owners, operators and managers from around Greece and abroad.

Gamato.info is estimated by Alexa.com to be the 13th most visited website in Greece. It seems that the number 13 was unlucky after all.

According to representatives of Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music, Gamato.info had been used to “facilitate large-scale copyright infringement of music, film, games and electronic books“.

The fans of Gamato.info have formed a protest group on Facebook that already has 85,000 members! With the recent announcement of austerity measures in the public sector in Greece, many young individuals are eager to express their rejection of anything that signifies authority, including the politicians and the police force.

Gamato.info had closed down again in January, following the arrests of the managers of Greek-Fun.com – another high traffic BitTorrent website, but opened again a few weeks later.

A third web site, Blue-WhiteGT.com that is also a membership only BitTorrent web portal catering to the Greek online community, inexplicably closed down yesterday and all the torrents are dead. No announcement has been made.

BitTorrent sites, such as ThePirateBay.org do not host the pirated files themselves; only point to the torrents that share the information of the individual computers around the world that possess bits and pieces of the shared files. Once the torrents are removed from the central web site, all the shared information is lost.

This situation juices up the drop-catching market, as these Greek domains that were raided by the police, once they expire they will be sought-after by drop-catching domainers for their valuable traffic. The domains expire in 2011, 2012 and 2013. Be careful though because once tagged as “hot”, they can also land future owners in trouble.