Z-Cult FM has removed DC and Top Cow torrents from their torrent tracker. This is due to what was reported earlier — the C&D letters from Marvel and DC.

Site admin Serj had this to say on their forums:

Ok last 7 days has been hell for the staff of Z-Cult FM and myself. Its not easy seeing your pride and joy that you have worked on since 2004 start falling apart by losing files from few big players, but life must go on.

I was faced with the decision tonight if we should just quit and shut down site on a kinda high… well 72k users and most hits we have ever had in our life time or carry on the good fight and evolve. Well for time being we are going to stay here and see where this takes us.

Over the last few days we have hired more staff (I say hire but they work for nothing) and they will be helping removing torrents and also moderating the posts on here. I must stress I DO NOT want posts on this forum that follow the lines of: “Where can I get latest 0day/[insert name here] pack now”

First this is breaking our rules and second have some good manners. All posts like this will be removed and repeat offenders banned.

We are currently throwing few ideas about in the staff room on what road to take but whatever road we decide to take we hope you will be there with us supporting us all the way. Over the next month or two you should see some nice features going up, some new looks about the place and new sections opening up.

For next few days/week please be good comic fans/cultists because the staff are busy behind the scenes cleaning all sections up and I don’t want them having to spend time policing debates over: “is our decision right/wrong?” or removing urls and requests for new places.

It appears that the comics industry is becoming RIAA-lite — instead of looking forward with the obvious interest in downloadable content, they’ve chosen the strangulation route. Marvel’s DCU is the closest, but Marvel refusing to sell downloads of the material . . .

I think an iTunes-esque business model would work well for the comics industry, but until one of the major publishers takes that chance, we’ll never know.