We would like to inform you that we have decided to shut down our site.
The past 2 years have been very difficult for us - some of the people in our team died due to covid complications,
others still suffer the side effects of it - not being able to work at all.
Some are also fighting the war in Europe - ON BOTH SIDES.
Also, the power price increase in data centers in Europe hit us pretty hard.
Inflation makes our daily expenses impossible to bare.
Therefore we can no longer run this site without massive expenses that we can no longer cover out of pocket.
After an unanimous vote we've decided that we can no longer do it.
We are sorry :(
Bye
Edit: This isn't me BTW. I just copy-pasted the text from the site.
First, a sincere thank you for all the efforts you have done. My collection of TV shows is nothing but ION10 webrips. You will be missed.
While I can respect your decision, I have to ask: Why the hell did you not choose to ask for donations or monetize the website?
While there are many that cannot afford to purchase, there are plenty of hackers that could have / would have supported you.
Considering the recent events in the area previously known as Yugoslavia, and the fact that part of hosting is there, in addition to Russia - Ukraine conflict being over a year old, I'd think of other sources. ...that if we were to trust what's been publicized, of course.
they are not searching the indexers, they are searching the DHT directly.
Some private trackers do not set the "disallow DHT" flag, so those will be indexed as well. Most do, however, and it's impossible to scrape those without an account, yes
They're not clones. Just proxies so they are down too.
This is usually done to make it harder for the courts to force providers to block these sites. Whack-a-mole..
PS: Why am I getting downvoted? Try clicking on the links, you will see the same goodbye message.
Edit: Oh the first 2 do seem to be clones, now I understand. The rest are proxies though. I do think even the clones basically skived off the original's database though so I doubt they will have much going forward.
The first two are 'clones' but they seem to have just taken a backup of the actual rarbg content from a few days ago (last torrents from the 25th of May!)
While that is true their releases are not the same, take the Attenborough doc wild isles the main rarbg top release was 44gb in size those u list is 13gb, no SWTYBLZ UHD releases
RARBG was originally Bulgarian, like many other trackers and warez stuff. Eastern Europe - inside EU or outside of the EU - has always been major player in this scene. RIP.
I'm still curious how it's possible to run such global illegal operations without being exposed or caught.
How is it still possible to remain anonymous on the Internet, considering in this age the thing is very mature and well commercialised?
Well, Bulgaria used to be a jurisdiction that doesn't care but this is no longer early 2000s. Are there really jurisdictions that don't care and still have connections to the rest of the world? I guess DPRK, Iran, Cuba and maybe a few more can do that but wouldn't they be a problem to the infrastructure provider to work with in first place?
They still don't quite care though. For example in western Europe it's quite common to get threatening letters as soon as you start torrenting without VPN. In eastern europe this is not happening.
Perhaps because copyright infringement is not really a criminal issue but more of a civil law one. Without a private party starting lawsuits on behalf of the copyright owners there is nothing happening. It could be they don't have one.
> in western Europe it's quite common to get threatening letters as soon as you start torrenting without VPN
What about the right of the privacy of communication? Oh, right, it's the state-owned postal services that have to respect that right, and only with regards to the paper letters, not the privately operated ISPs that can (and obliged to) wiretap at the slightest suspicion of crime.
AFAIK they don't actually inspect your comms, instead they leech from you to get your IP address and start the legal procedure. The way I understand it, they don't send you a letter for downloading but for sharing. Correct me if I'm wrong though.
Depending on your jurisdiction, even just downloading might be illegal. But you're right, when you torrent, you publish your IP address, where parties unrelated to your ISP might get it and pursue legal action.
Is it they do illegal thing and then try to extort money from you for doing the same thing? Or have they received a royal blessing nowadays and can do so legally?
You're correct on the methodology except that (in France at least) they also seed, to get the IP of users that download. And you do get letters for downloading.
Initially the plan was to ban those people from internet for a period of that but it got removed since it was anticonstitutional.
It should be noted that (as far as I know) none of those are actually fines. It's private companies that track down pirates, and they cannot give out fines. They send you a settlement proposal, saying either pay this or risk being sued.
Note that in the Netherlands right holders can request ISPs to proxy their letters but those ISPs are not allowed to share the home addresses or any other personal information so it’s neigh impossible for a right holder to get hold of a torrent user.
Does the UK send letters and fines? I haven't torrented without a VPN for years but the worst I ever heard anyone getting was a letter from the ISP saying "that was very naughty, please don't do it again".
This isn't the ISPs detecting you torrent. It's rightholders joining a torrent swarm, getting an IP-address, and asking the ISP for the person behind that address. It differs between jurisdictions whether the ISP has to comply or not. In the Netherlands they do not, (but Surfnet, a university focused ISP complies anyway). In Germany they have to comply.
Lobbying is always happening to require ISPs to cooperate though.
Seriously, screw Germany here. The way they oppressively Gestapo your internet traffic just to catch you downloading an mp3 to treat you like criminal menace, is unheard of in the rest of Europe.
Can't believe the so called "privacy conscious" German public are okay with this invasiveness of their internet privacy when they're the only EU country as hardcore on this "issue".
If only they would invest as much resources in digital innovation as they do in catching people download a DVD rip, Germany would rule the tech world.
Resources not as in tech but as in lack of red tape in invading people's privacy for such trivial issues. In any other country this would get you laughed out of court.
Germany seems like they just do what involves the most policing. If it's going after companies for privacy invasions, they do it. If it's going after individuals for infringing on copyright, they do it.
They got rid of the laws that targeted people by race and background, but they never bothered to dispose of the jack boots.
Meh that's why I stay away from German services. People who go apeshit on you for sharing one 64kb chunk of movie have lost their marbles. Service provider is GmbH, headquarters in Germany? Maybe someone from the other side of the world believes in their "privacy" lunatism.
For US, it's natural that they are aggressive to arrest pirates because US have some biggest content holders in the world. I wonder is Germany content sold well?
> If only they would invest as much resources in digital innovation as they do in catching people download a DVD rip, Germany would rule the tech world.
I don't think it's expensive, once you've the software:
1- regularly pull the torrent IDs from the latest releases on most popular torrenting website
2- download and stream the movies
3- wait for German IPs to connect
4- filter out IPs behind a VPN
5- identify the IP provider
6- send the request, probably by Email
7- profit
Not sure how advanced the software, but I don't see much manual input needed, it must be actually very lucrative
> Can't believe the so called "privacy conscious" German public are okay with this invasiveness
Nothing against Germans but there is a lot of hypocrisy in their society:
- Energiewende vs. shutting down Nuclear Plants and turning on Coal
- Green cars vs. 300km/h on the Autobahn
- Go to a restaurant in a big German city, guys tell you they don't accept cards, then hand write the bill on a napkin (...) vs. Greece where restaurants are legally obliged to accept cards and if they don't, then you can just walk out without paying (!..) (all this since the EU driven by Germany bailed Greece out)
Depends on the ISP. Telia will hand out your details to copyright holders, Bahnhof will require them to file the request through the police. Most rights holders just sont bother with Bahnhof or the smaller ISPs and just send batches to Telia and ComHem.
imo copyright is irrelevant in countries that either can withstand the mpaa's pressure, maybe via good relations to the state department, or in countries that have bigger problems.
Potential Impact on Major Pirate Sites as Vietnam ISPs Face New Responsibilities, May 12, 2023.
> “Most Voluminous” Copyright Decree Ever Issued in Vietnam
> Global IP services firm Rouse reports that with 8 chapters and 116 articles, Decree 17 is the most voluminous copyright decree ever issued in Vietnam.
> “[T]he Copyright Decree provides significantly detailed guidance on copyright enforcement, especially which disputes can be classified as a copyright dispute, how to establish acts of copyright infringement, and how to calculate damages caused by infringements,” the company reports.
> “The long, detailed section in copyright assessment is also expected to pave the way for the growth of the currently limited copyright assessment services in Vietnam.”
Does Iceland actually care much? I don't imagine they'd let you host an actual warez site a la 2000 or so, but a site just hosting magnet links seems like something they'd mostly allow, and they DEFINITELY have the infrastructure to handle it.
That all said, I'm always amazed that these sites don't just move to i2p/tor. The torrents themselves have been decentralized with DHT and magnet links for awhile. At the end of the day it seems like they've just been hanging on trying to avoid being so in the shadows that they get less traffic as a result.
I've yet to see Google not return a piratebay link at any point in history. Is it a loophole where they take it down, but their indexer then immediately puts it back in the next pass, lol?
> I've yet to see Google not return a piratebay link at any point in history. Is it a loophole where they take it down, but their indexer then immediately puts it back in the next pass, lol?
No. If you pay attention there can be a message at the bottom of the search results telling you how many results were removed due to takedown requests. IIRC, they used to even link directly to the request, but now I think you have to jump through hoops to see it.
The "loophole" is that a takedown request has to be for a specific URL, so it requires a lot of constant effort to even try to get them all. Pirate Bay always had dupes and a million mirrors.
I'm not being nit-picky or contentious - I'm asking from a genuine point of curiousity ...
but in the case of Google linking to the pirate bay, isn't the pirate bay the one linking to the pirated content? Google is 1 step removed in that node graph because they are just linking to the pirate bay.
I guess if they directly linked to a pirate bay page that had a magent link on it .... maybe (?)
A court is unlikely to care about the distinction between actually linking to pirated content, and linking to a page with both instructions and a link to the pirated content. To add, enough TPB torrents contain screenshots.
Also, Google's takedown request handling in Google Search is not a matter of DMCA or a legal matter at all - instead, it's like Content ID, where they have their own system for evaluating takedown requests separate from any law. Rights-holders can still send Google legal requests, but it's easier to go through the expedited processes Google provides that also won't increase rights-holders' liability if they happen to submit a false takedown.
Google seems to refuse removing because, according to them, "Whole-site removal is ineffective and can easily result in censorship of lawful material."
Instead of removing, they just remove links by request.
Isn't this the same loophole that MegaUpload used? Only removing a link to a file, not the file itself with the claim that other links belonged to potentially lawful owners of the file.
I mean, if the subpoena says "remove a link" you comply with that.
But there's also another fundamental difference: even if there's the expectation of removing all copies of the same exact file, it is "trivial" for MegaUpload to know, by using hashes. They do have access to all files, as it is in their servers.
For Google to delete all pirate links to movie X it would be much more complicated, and would put them on a position of being forced to be the internet police.
It's been 5 or 6 years ago now, but one night I searched for torrents for a particular movie, and Google returned hundreds of results from a dozen sites... and the next evening they returned 0. I think it was an October.
While I don't doubt that a torrent link shows up once in awhile, Google no longer usefully searches for such things. Or really anything, legal or not. It's more like a purchase recommendation system pretending to be a search engine.
At the bottom there is a message that says "In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 4 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at LumenDatabase.org" and links to https://lumendatabase.org/notices/27615507
Google will only remove specific URLs, not entire sites/domains. Even if every copyright holder with content on TPB sent a DMCA notice to Google today, new torrents -- at new URLs -- would pop up tomorrow.
Can't speak for rarbg, but plenty of piracy adjacent sites have a DMCA takedown program[0] to operate under this loophole. That way, most content survives but they are "protected"
Alphabet is valued at over 1.5 Trillion dollars. If they pay 1 Billion USD in fines per year, maybe their lawyers are actually doing an ok job for their client.
That’s why magnet links were invented for torrents. They don’t link to any content, just give your client a unique ID to find peers for.
Like saying a site mentioning that you should look for “cannabis” if you want to get high is illegal. Selling the substance is illegal, telling you how it’s called isn’t.
It doesn't link to a file or embed any tracker names but it does name a 1080p HEVC (x265) encoded season pack of season 5 of a US police procedural drama (which is excess and unrequired but humans do like readable names)
What it does provide is a unique hash code that matches the exact torrent ... should you find it.
When you add that magnet link to your torrent client it triggers the act of polling any public trackers your client knows about and any peers that have "hit me up about magnets" enabled.
Ideally word spreads and eventually some other client | tracker hits you back with word of other peers that at least have some cannabis .. (err, bits of Rizzoli&Isles Season 5 HEVC pack).
A magnet URI is a little bit like a web link in the sense that it refers to a particular piece of data, but it doesn't point to any particular host or location. It is merely a hash of the files it describes. So in other words, the link doesn't tell you where the particular content can be found, it only tells you what the content is that it refers to.
To actually find the content in question you take the link, go on a peer to peer network, and basically ask machines if they have the content in question available or know where it is. There's various ways to do that, in some cases your torrent app might know the location of some centralized "tracker" servers, and ask those servers whether they know locations for those files. Some torrents are "trackerless" and use a DHT, a type of distributed database that keeps information about where to find files.
It's deprecated and I believe it only used to work in very old AWS regions for legacy reasons. Not sure what the current status is but it clearly has no future.
beeig edgy and exploring edge cases for the sake of the argument has indeed become somewhat anti-social. i guess it has something to do with the width of the audience, as the bigger the crowd, the more likely it is that someone will take you serious and make a fuss about it.
Who are those people who are offended when you introduce an edge case against their argument? This is very weird behaviour because the whole civilisation is built on finding edge cases to demonstrate that a model doesn't work.
For example, would it be offensive to say that a feather and a hammer will fall at the same speed on the moon to take down the Aristotle's theory of gravity? Is it OK to not talk about that kind of stuff in order not to offend Aristotletes?
it is very wired if you (plural) are looking for truth or consensus or progress.
but normies are generally freaked out, because they are not used to real talk. i often crash into this barrier of non-sense talk for the sake of conversation as well, very painful for both sides.
i'm sure aristotle wouldn't be offended but encouraged :)
Yes, you are a special flower and people are annoyed at you not because you're grating, rude, or arrogant, but because they are stupid and only want to talk about the Kardashians or whatever.
Reporter: So, to end the interview I have to ask you about an experiment that everyone's talking about and you must be aware of. It's been said that marbles and cannonballs dropped from a tower at the same time have been seen to land at the same time. If there are any comments you'd like to make about that, I'm sure the public would love to hear them.
Aristotle Scholar: You know, I'm actually glad you asked this, because these kind of "gotcha" questions show everyone the unfortunate state of journalism today, its disrespect for scholarship, and its willingness to peddle whatever trash that people are circulating in order to undermine our institutions. [wrestles wooden microphone off lapel and storms off set.]
The problem is people don't know if you're asking questions to indicate your disapproval (or to cause people grief) or if you're asking to understand. In other words bad faith questions vs good faith questions.
People get offended when you're asking bad faith questions. And it can be difficult to differentiate the two, especially when people discussing don't know each other.
I know someone who is often snippy with me because I ask questions where I legitimately want to understand something, but she assumes I'm asking to indicate she's done something wrong.
You can still buy pre-paid credit cards in many places, and many places allow you to pay for anonymous servers with cards.
Worst case if they had enough money they could rent somewhere and pay for a decent internet connection and not actually live there, so only the equipment would be seized.
I think the "new meta" is sketchy popup/popunder ad providers that pay BTC/USDT, njal.la/nic.ru/some Chinese registrar paid with crypto or a virtual card, DDOS-guard/Cloudflare to make getting the origin IP annoying, and hosting in an ex-USSR country (and sometimes even mainstream Western providers like Leaseweb or OVH). But that's just the impression I got by occasionally using these sites, looking at domain/IP whois and using one of those Cloudflare deanonymizer sites when it was still up.
How expensive can a link sharing site be to run, genuinely? They're not serving any of the content (unless they are, in which case, yeah...) But if they're just serving up .torrent files or magnet links, these sites should be pretty cheap to run I would assume?
It tends to run a little more when you're using hosting in a country that doesn't respect US copyright (and similarly for most EU) along with keeping your information private to begin with. When I had looked into it, it's been roughly 2x what a typical western dedicated server provider might charge.
This doesn't count the issues with a site that is very popular, from bandwidth to even simple database search overhead. If I were to guess, it's that RarBG probably spent in excess of $10k/month, which isn't much if you're a startup with a runway of VC capital or a revenue stream, it's a lot more if you're in a smaller country or don't have an excess of revenue.
It's very possible to run such without being exposed, but it involves patience and enough cash.
Most of the time, these services aren't done in direct exchange for money or from people who have a lot of money in the first place.
So what ends up happening is even if they can avoid the shallow legal issues by remaining private, they then run into the problem that nobody can pay for the service (not many options for providing that transaction privately). You might think "just run ads" but the problem there is multifaceted, most are likely going to be using adblockers, on top of that to remain private they'll be locked out of most paying ads and only get the most spammy garbage incentivizing more to use adblocker to visit the site.
Also: ad companies and payment processors are a weak link. They can provide de-anonymizing information to officials and cut off payments when their corporate values shift.
I always wondered this. Many piracy sites have Adsense or some sort of ads. Can't Google just fingerprint which Adsense account is being used and find the person getting paid?
There's an entire industry of buying established accounts set up with an unsuspecting person's identity. Idk about Adsense specifically, but you can get Amazon selling and the linked bank account with docs for like $1000.
This screams poor opsec to me. Accepting anything other than anonymized crypto (Monero, etc) is basically untenable in this era of mass surveillance. Going through a big tech company is a good way to get caught.
AFOAF belongs to the same pvt tracker now for more than a dozen years. The admins amp and push the community feels and have periodic fund raisers. No ads, and if you want to donate, you buy a jpg of a flower on an different site.
Seems to work out well for all concerned and while you have to maintain an u/d ratio, free leach and easy generous ratio reqts contribute to that community feeling.
>> How is it still possible to remain anonymous on the Internet, considering in this age the thing is very mature and well commercialised?
Because at the core, identity on the internet is not well defined. Authentication is a hard problem. You might wonder why it's hard, why better more secure protocols haven't emerged. Answer: that makes end to end encryption easy, among other things that give individuals too much power.
AI produced Obits, and death certs and detailed descriptions of the death, and then new documents produced via GPT6+ access to APIs to DMV, Embassies, etc to produce new documents sent to your new PO box in [place] etc...
-
deep-fake assassinations are going to be a thing...
The answer to this is easier (and harder) than you might think: just don't say anything.
You can get away with quite a bit just by being silent, and for longer than you'd think. A big way that people get away with things for so long is just by not answering questions. Someone says, "Is this [illegal thing] yours" and you say nothing. Now you've got to burn hours and dollars trying to prove someone owns something so that you can go after them.
You'll find domains, web hosts, countries, and employees who are all onboard with the same philosophy. When everything requires a subpoena at the highest level to move something forward, it can easily take years for anything to happen at all. Some countries are known for having slow legal systems. Stack jurisdictions with slow court systems and you can start with an 18 month window before anything can happen.
You've got a domain in Tonga registered to a company in another country, owned by a large company in another country owned by a trust in a third country. Often small countries with limited resources and archaic or corrupt bureaucracies. And where is it hosted? That's probably another connect the dots. And the site can change hands and then you have to start all over again. Are you going to refocus on the new owner or are you going to spend even more resources trying to track down the former owner?
And any of these entities may lead to nothing more than a mule, fake person, or dead person. Sure, it's someone's fault for having inaccurate records—but who? How long has this been going on? Did they know? Was it intentional? It shouldn't be like this, but it is… what do you do now? Are you going to go after the recordkeeper too?
You can do illegal shit for years or even decades if you just say nothing and respond to no one.
> Someone says, "Is this yours" and you say nothing. Now you've got to burn hours and dollars trying to prove someone owns something so that you can go after them.
The opposite is the German approach. Shower the cuntiest lawyers with money, lobby for laws allowing to easily pick a victim, bully the victim senseless. Lobby even more and if someone uses the word "corruption" in context of copyrights, bully the shit out of them as well. I'm so glad Anglosphere and German copyrights predators have been perfectly impotent for so many years. They know how to create faceless enemies.
Germany really takes the price when it comes to (torrent-based) piracy. The lawyers around it created a nice little ecosystem for themselves. Honeypot torrents and all. They have such a nice system that they don't go for the torrent sites, just milk the torrenters.
It also creates a weird liability where hotel owners have to snoop on their users in order to deflect responsibility. It also stimulates self-censorship. VPNs are likely very popular in Germany.
In my experience law firms would not hop through these. That is the job of hired ethical hackers, police and prosecutor's office.
A law firm would be useful in (a) applying to remove illegal content, (b) seize any profit generated by illegal use of clents' content, (c) (if the client requests) horrify users identified of such illegal services, (d) pressure the authorities to crack down on the operation.
Most lawyers do not understand the technical details. We do a hell of a good job of understanding experts' findings and put them in a clear legal structure though.
Most of the boring but billable job I ever made was searching through company registries, google searches, sanctions searches, panama papers searches, reviewing countless pdfs to either (i) mark them as privileged so they cannot be used as evidence, (ii) scan whether there are any documents that may directly implicate the client and if so try to find a way to legally claim it is unusable.
I believe law firms do provide decent service. Billables are there, but no lawyer I know would willingly generate busywork that does not lead anywhere to charge more. OTOH, I HAVE seen instances where a work got reviewed multiple times by different lawyers, because the client was willing to pay more. But even in these edge cases, multiple reviews did benefit the client and they received a better work product.
My advice would be establish a good working relationship with a lawyer in the firm that you trust, continuously send work. Ask estimates if you are on a tight budget. But do not be cheap and try to get things done with less budget. Law firms provide a service you need, if you pay them decently you'll receive your money's worth. Lawyers will literally take a bullet for you to make things happen when you need them.
> My advice would be establish a good working relationship with a lawyer in the firm that you trust, continuously send work. Ask estimates if you are on a tight budget. But do not be cheap and try to get things done with less budget. Law firms provide a service you need, if you pay them decently you'll receive your money's worth. Lawyers will literally take a bullet for you to make things happen when you need them.
What’s the order of magnitude here? There have been times in my life where I would have found having a lawyer on standby to be incredibly helpful (e.g. car purchase gone bad, property usage rights dispute, etc.), but at the same time spending $100k a year to have a lawyer on standby to resolve an issue of $5-10k in magnitude is foolish.
You could try legal insurance. Costs about 200$ equivalent/year where I live, then I have a place to ask legal questions and escalate as needed. I think they cover the first 150k$ worth of legal costs with any lawyer I pick if it goes that far and their in-house lawyers can’t get the other party to back down.
Most of the times you do not pay for stand by. If there is work to do your lawyer charges you in billable hours. That is the point of the billable hours system. For larger projects you can get a fee estimate, fixed quote or agree on a hybrid solution.
I am also talking about corporate law work. Maintaining corporate records, lease agreements, employment agremeents, director changes et.
Am a lawyer. This is correct. Drafting subpoenas, motions, applications, convincing a skeptical judge that Twitter posts are "real" evidence, or explaining how DNS records work, not to mention actually scheduling a damn hearing, then multiply that by 4 or 5 jurisdictions (therefore 4 or 5 sets of lawyers), and you got yourself easily a few years' worth of work.
Let's say I was observing something similar and this is absolutely correct. Stay low profile, say nothing, don't boast to scratch your itching ego and everything will be fine.
A lot of people will be surprised by knowing what kind of businesses is ran from that shabby house in the corner by visibly low life mate driving 30yo celica.
>I'm still curious how it's possible to run such global illegal operations
Because it is not obviously illegal. A tracker just points to the content, not the content itself. That may seem meaningless, but then so are the arbitrary demands of copyright holders. They want to have their cake and eat it too. So the system works as intended.
o7 thank you for your service, keeping the Internet awesome and anti-corporate.
Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse.
Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel, allowing the existence of legal, paid streaming sites a-la-Spotify with access to 99% of the repertoire. Until then, torrent is how we protest while they create more and more insular streaming services to milk people $9/mo at a time.
"Piracy is almost always a service problem." — Gabe Newell
(If you need a semi-private tracker that's easy to get into, try TorrentLeech. Also /r/opensignups)
A service and a pricing problem. All cases of piracy I have observed stem from one of 3 reasons
1. Too expensive. This encompasses several varieties, like the media in question being literally priced more than the person is willing to pay, or the pricing is acceptable, but the person can buy only one of several choices and wants to evaluate all before giving one their money.
2. The product is not offered for sale. This is sometimes literally that the product isn't available for sale in your country, or the product is not available in a useful form, e.g. it doesn't come with subtitles in your language, it won't work on your device, it requires a stable internet connection, which you don't have, etc.
3. For political reasons, to avoid supporting DRM.
With the globalisation, there is actually a 4th reason rising: availability of content in specific regions.
I sometimes want/need content with audio and/or subtitle language X, which is not available legally where I live, but the exact same platform does have it available in the region that speaks this language.
pirating is in this case the best solution as I can pick the quality I want, with the audio and subtitle languages I need.
I think this is just the second reason rephrased a bit differently. And it isn't at all new — pretty much all Japanese game and animation studios have refused to acknowledge our region's existence for about as long as these industries have themselves been around.
For example, Nintendo consoles have been unavailable since the 90s — which is why we've been using these clones:
and are still unavailable now unless you're willing to buy consoles and games on ebay, overpriced and without warranty (which is what some of my friends have been doing, but I refuse to support publishers that consider my American dollars second class to those coming from actual Americans).
So torrents it is, then. 'Fuck you' can go both ways.
Disney holding back the second half of the final season of Amphibia.
Released in the US but not here for unexplained reasons. For 6 months piracy was the only way to get a conclusion.
Our Flag Means Death, even though it had a large section of its cast from Britain it wasn't available to watch for far too long here.
I could go on, but you get the point. Any distribution rules are a creation of their own making in the first place.
This is very much a practical reason as well, though this overlaps with "not available in a usable form". DRM is the reason I can't watch movies at the highest bitrates and resolutions on my device from Netflix or Amazon. It's the reason I can't trust that things I purchase will be available to me indefinitely. It's the reason I can't build a collection of media (e.g. with Kodi) that is playable on my TV with one click with a single unifying interface.
> The product is not offered for sale.
This extends to some other cases as well. For instance, where the only available version is a crappy remaster (Terminator 2), and the original is much superior. Or if you want to watch the film with a director's commentary.
There's also, very broadly, a 4th reason - convenience. This encompasses both ease of use (if I know what movie I want to watch, I don't have to search to see where it's streaming), and discoverability (a good torrent site will easily let you see all the movies by a director or actor, and provide recommendations). Or if you're looking for a particular special feature, it's much more convenient to be able to download it than to go looking for a physical media copy and wait for it to be shipped to your door.
Exactly. I dropped out of the torrent scene for probably around 5 years when Netflix had a huge back-catalog and it just wasn't worth the hassle to manage torrents and a media server.
Then the Netflix catalog shrunk to originals, there's now 6 different streaming services I have to juggle to watch the usual content my family likes, and we're constantly using third-party services just to figure out what's available where. I hate having to switch from Netflix to Hulu to finish out a show because the last season is only on Hulu. Or things like Warner and Disney cutting shows because they don't want to pay residuals or whatever dumb accounting BS they feel like pulling.
If you make it more convenient to torrent and shove everything into Plex, why would I pay to get a worse experience.
My experience is that 100% of what I see on friends' (and friends' friends') Plex shares is.... movies that they downloaded via TPB/RarBG/etc torrents.
If the supply of torrented content dries up, it seems like many Plex shares will start to become very stale.
Plex Shares (like ones you buy on the internet from a stranger) are mostly fully automated and pull from private/public trackers + usenet. I don't see the supply of torrents really having any effect in this regard.
Ofcourse, I'm not saying torrents don't have a place it's just that they seem less trafficked these days , online piracy streaming sites , iptv(with vod) and Plexshares have taken the front seat.
Uh, because it responded to a comment that wrote a bunch of 2009-era Guy Fawkes mask-wearing redditor bullshit that attempts to make piracy noble.
> o7 thank you for your service
(o7 would be a salute)
> Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse.
False and nonsense, especially in 2023.
> Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel...
Okay, I'll stop here.
I'm fine with piracy, personally. I'd prefer we just admit that you're mostly using it to download movies, music, and television shows for free. This isn't some noble fight for freedom. We're talking about watching mindless bullshit content like Star Wars, without paying for it. Piracy proponents, and comments like the one starting this thread, make it seem like we're entitled to this content. We're not. But I'll admit, I don't watch much in the way of tv or movies any more anyway, so the whole debate is lost on me.
I just rolled my eyes at the ridiculous tone of that comment, like they're freedom fighters. It's self-important bullshit.
I love when soulless corporations bribe governments to keep a stranglehold on works of art that have impacted cultures around the world and prevent future artists from being able make more art and prevent the proper collection and preservation of these works and block the access to them, all so they can keep making money off of decades old IP.
It goes both ways. There are no Saints to be found on either side.
I don't care one bit about the pocketbooks of our corporate overlords, and neither should you.
I take my kids to the movies. I subscribe to services like Apple Music and TV+, and HBO Max. We watch YouTube videos where there's sponsored content in them. We buy officially licensed merchandise like clothing and toys. We buy books, both physical and digital.
And, frankly, it doesn't matter what I do personally. Millions, hell billions, of people around the world do as well.
If artists are struggling it's because they're not getting paid properly by the corporations they work for, like Disney, Netflix, and others. It's not because of individuals like you or me or the people that run piracy sites.
If artists are struggling it's because they're not getting paid properly by the corporations they work for, like Disney, Netflix, and others. It's not because of individuals like you or me or the people that run piracy sites.
This is false. Artists get paid residuals, meaning, per sale, so every non-sale due to piracy is literally coming out of artists' pockets.
Not once in the history of my consumption of digital content has me not pirating something turned into a sale.
Sometimes I pirate it, sometimes I buy it. Sometimes I consume something free instead. Sometimes I pay for the stuff I don't consume at all. But the substitution is always in the direction of cheaper, more available solution. Never in the direction of buying something.
There were cases however when me pirating something eventually turned into a sale or even few sales.
And yet, demonstrably speaking, not pirating something leads to actual sales amongst normal people.
It's truly bizarre that so many techies complain about the "cost" of artistic works while they sip their $20 lattes and go to their six-figure jobs with ergonomic chairs and free snacks.
What's bizzare is that some of those rich people you mention actually internalized corporate made morality toward "intelectual property" and proselytize it as if that was their full time job.
To them piracy is and always has been theft, the way that Santa is wearing and has always been wearing red.
In fairness, somebody has to pay for the actors and the grips and the foley artists, and I'm not particularly convinced that the pirate's stance of "I want it for 20 cents, in 4k, and DRM free and if I can't have that then torrrenting it is my moral right" is either right or sustainable.
> somebody has to pay for the actors and the grips and the foley artists
They are paid. If they're not paid enough then that's on the companies behind the production of those shows and movies.
These corporations make billions. Piracy isn't hurting them. However, these corporations are causing harm to society. It doesn't make sense to white knight for them.
Many corporations make billions. That isn't an argument to not pay for the goods or services they offer.
I'll add, since I'm not the person you were replying to, I don't care about who gets paid what. I don't care if the actors get paid or not. All I care about is some basic consistency if we're going to have morals about anything. Is it wrong to steal? Yes? Then piracy is wrong. (Or, no? Then let's skip this conversation entirely, you are my enemy.) Yeah, piracy is pretty easy. Yeah, it feels harmless when we do it. Should individuals get fined tens of thousands of dollars for infractions? No. But I'd say it's about as wrong as stealing a loaf of bread from a grocery store. To pretend it's a noble cause is transparent garbage, and unless you can pose an argument that doesn't complain about how much corporations make, I'm not interested.
There appears to be nothing underpinning your worldview for why the industry you work in ought not allow open thievery, but this one should. Yes, their corporations make billions of dollars, just like in every other industry where theft is not tolerated. Or perhaps you support open thievery everywhere at any time, in which case, like I said, you are my enemy.
We disagree before your argument even begins to form. I don't believe that piracy, the act of downloading a movie, tv show, or song is stealing.
On the flip side, these corporations take from society and refuse to give back thanks to ridiculously long copyright protection terms.
They take advantage of their workers, paying a fraction of a penny to them that they make.
They screw artists over with bad contracts or lousy residuals.
They defraud investors by purposely producing works they know won't perform well.
They use things like the DMCA to bankrupt anyone that tries to write software that gets around DRM.
They threaten to sue people into oblivion that use P2P software to download something they "own."
They cover up the crimes of pedophiles and other sexual predators because they make them money.
So, again, I don't care about the pocketbooks of these corporations. I don't care that someone can download a movie without paying for it. I don't care that groups like rarbg or TPB exist.
> you are my enemy
This is exactly the type of thing an internet white knight would write. You're ridiculous.
I agree with your plea for moral consistency, but it should be noted that describing the unlicensed copying of data as "stealing" and "thievery" is a metaphor. If I steal a car, I have denied someone else use of the car. If I pirate a film that I would never have paid for, I have enriched myself at no cost to anyone else. If I pirate a film which I would otherwise have paid for, then yes, I have impoverished the studio.
Sorry to be picky, but I think it's important to remember that intellectual "property" rights are a legal construct that societies create in an attempt to make society as a whole richer by encouraging creativity. I worry that overuse of metaphors like "property" and "theft" elevate IP to a god-given commandment (thou shalt not steal), obscuring the fact that we should design our intellectually property rights to ensure they're doing what we want. Enriching creators is not an end goal in itself.
I agree in a sense, it's a grey area, given the only crime is a person is literally copying a work and enjoying/using it. So my biggest issue with IP laws are that the potential punishments for copying do not come close to matching the crime, as they're quite draconian.
And I find it hard to believe that the spirit of these laws was intended to target end-users who copy something to watch for their own personal enjoyment, rather than to target people who copied works in an attempt to earn a profit personally. The only way the punishment fits the crime is in the latter situation, IMO. Yet I assume the laws are applied more frequently to the former situation.
Your useless copypasted comments brought nothing to this discussion. You have changed nobody's mind. Have you wrote all that to make yourself feel good?
Creating fake meanings for old words doesn't make them real.
They even had to go through one level of indirection to make people believe what they made up.
They couldn't just say, watching digital copy witout paying for it is a theft because people would just laugh at them, no it's not.
They had to do a two step process through obsure old crime to confuse people. Using a digital copy without paying for it is piracy. And piracy is theft.
Consuming didgital content on your own terms has as much to do with theft as it has with actual piracy that got some resurgence around Africa in recent years.
>> "Piracy is almost always a service problem." — Gabe Newell
Once again; the media companies are absolutely doing everything in their power to drive even casual media consumers into piracy. I wouldn't be surprised if piracy was already more rampant than it's ever been - but it's only getting worse, due to ludicrous streaming fragmentation.
It'll never happen, but the only thing that can save piracy is an aggregate all-inclusive monthly subscription platform where all the films/shows from all services are available, just like Apple Music or Spotify. I pay $30-40/mo and I have access to all the stuff on Netflix, Prime, Max, Disney...
When you stream a movie from Netflix, they get the credit. Disney? The same.
Nobody is going to pay for all these services, and more and more are ditching them altogether. The response of the streaming services is to increase prices and reduce content. It's hilariously embarrassing. They are asking us to pirate.
> "Piracy is almost always a service problem." — Gabe Newell
I find this an odd argument in favor of pirating movies, because everything that steam offers for games, amazon prime or itunes offers for most tv shows and movies. In fact with amazon prime you can buy content and watch it on pretty much any kind of device out there.
> Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel, allowing the existence of legal, paid streaming sites a-la-Spotify with access to 99% of the repertoire. Until then, torrent is how we protest while they create more and more insular streaming services to milk people $9/mo at a time.
I have been hearing people make this same basic argument since the 90s. (I'm sure it's older than that.) During that time the price of video and audio entertainment has decreased while availability and quality have vastly improved. Despite this, piracy is still going strong. The ideological goalposts used to justify it keep moving, but the desire for free stuff is timeless. (Not judging here -- I've certainly done my share.)
Adjusting for inflation: Twenty years ago, a DVD with one recent movie cost ~$30, or you could rent one for $5-8. One album on CD cost ~$20. Buying individual songs for the then-unheard of price of $1.65 (99 cents at the time) on iTunes was brand new. They had limited bit rate and DRM, and you had to buy an expensive iPod if you wanted to use them conveniently. If you wanted good TV shows, you paid something like $60-80/month for cable TV (more if you wanted to watch The Sopranos) and had to watch on a schedule, with lots of ads.
If you compare that to today's world of cheap streaming services, high-quality DRM-free music, and even cheaper physical media, it's not even a contest.
That's a very US centric view of the problem. Because these days if you leave the borders of your country, you'll see that the streaming world is still a fragmented archipelago of crappy B-tier licensed movies, while the good stuff people want to watch is only available in the US through a VPN.
And cable TV or films at the cinema are as expensive as ever.
Which is why Spotify has had an incredible success worldwide and music piracy has reduced dramatically: their repertoire is very comprehensive and mostly the same everywhere in the world.
People really want to believe it is a money issue, and they are just terribly misguided. Gabe Newell is absolutely right here, and he knows piracy, as he deals with the demographic with expensive needs (gamers wanting the latest $70 game) and the least money (as young gamers don't have a job, or don't earn a lot)
First heart break was when Kickass was taken down.. Now this. I am literally too sad over a website than my other life choices lol.. Love you RARBG team, will miss you till death. Good luck in your life's.
That's pretty devastating. This was old reliable for a long time. I could never keep up with the demands from private trackers as streaming made it so I didn't need to utilize them as much.
Checkout sonarr and radarr together with jackett. Plenty of ways to find zillions of sites. Most dark streaming sites use these tools to fully automate everything
Last I checked you can get in IPTorrents and HDTorrents with a donation. Still need to maintain your ratio but you can also boost your upload with donations.
i was always skeptical on people saying that torrentz are a symptom of bad legal streaming services..
Well, i recently got myself a videoprojector with an android tv included, and since i happen to have an amazon prime account, i installed the app, which is quite good.
And yes, it's true, since i've done that, my torrentz usage has dramatically dropped..
I got myself Amazon prime, logged in on my computer, and found out I can only watch 480p video because of DRM shenanigans. The app on my TV is no longer supported (TV doesn't run Android), my phone is rooted (Xiaomi stopped making updates after two years) so I sometimes can't even find the app in Google Play let alone play decent quality video and the Chromecast app is a buggy mess.
So yeah, I went back to torrents after that. All of my problems disappeared when I just had an MP4 file I could play anywhere. I'm still paying my subscription but they can take my 1080p video from my cold dead hands.
I get your point, and i may be in the same case as you in a few years (my projector is brand new).
But that doesn't really disprove my point : when the legal streaming service is working fine, then it does have an immediate effect on pirated content consumption.
I thought that not being able to have access to all the content in the world would be a no-go, but i'm surprising myself preferring to watch legal content directly in two taps of the remote than having to search for the torrentz, the subtitles, download it, plug the computer to my projector, etc.
When streaming services do work as intended, most of them definitely work better than piracy. I'd stop pirating entirely if they did, for a reasonable price.
Hopefully the industry gets its shit together so I can legally watch shows and movies without waiting a week and so I don't need to consult two different "look up where you can stream something please don't pirate" websites to watch shows anymore. Until that magical day comes, I'll keep pirating.
Dont forget to subscribe to all the other 100+ streaming platforms, as originals will not end up on amazon.
Oh, and hopefully you will never need a subtitle that is for a language that's not the main one in your region.
legal streaming is horrible at the moment.
To be able to battle at least some of the reasons to pirate media they need to fix a couple of things (and this is just my shortlist, there's 1000+ more reasons)
- allow indexing and playback outside of the official app so 1 app could be used for multiple platform subscriptions
- allow access to content no matter where the viewer is on the world. Not only the video, but audio and subtitle languages as well
- allow subscriptions for specific content, not a 'one subscription fits all'. I dont want to watch nor pay for yet another Walking Dead something, but I do want to watch See
- allow to buy content, and provide that DRM free in high quality (not the streaming quality)
I agree. It seems like an flippant opinion, and I'm sure many use it that way, but some services, and frankly, regimes have proven that convenience, comfort and ease of access is very attractive to people. If a service can navigate the obstacles such as copyright, they will be more popular than taking the thing for free with a bit of work.
As a mentionned to someone else in the thread, i've realized that i was actually ok seeing less popular content straight from the remote control, than search for the top content in torrents.
Ease of use and guaranteed video & subtitles quality can compensate to some degree to not having access to all the content in the world.
No doubt! I'm in IT myself and it's second nature doing stuff like this. Most people have a different set of experience and knowledge though. I only experienced the convenience of streaming sites when I began using other devices for media, like my phone. On the phone, it was much easier to use whatever streaming than to search a torrent site, download on phone / seedbox, wait, navigate to the file, play the file. With streaming it's just search and play.
Streaming is a content ghetto. 9 times out of 10, none of the streaming websites have the media I'm looking for. When I visit friends and family and am made to sit down with their streaming services and find something to watch, it always turns into a disaster of everybody sitting on the couch browsing the various catalogue on their phones, discovering that no service has whatever movie somebody just thought of and suggested.
If you treat streaming like old cable television; you turn it on then decide what you want to watch from what is available, I guess it might seem fine to you. But if you try to decide what you want to watch first, treating streaming as a means to an end rather than the end itself, then streaming is unmitigated trash.
rutracker is amazing. I've had no problems with the stuff I download from there (games, movies, books and software) and they also have some super niche stuff as well. Rip RARGB
phenomenal site. while the content is upped by users the fact that multiple rips were found on the same page; SDR, HDR, HDR10, 264, 265, 720, 1080, 2160, dubbed, original, theatrical cuts, director's, producer's etc. was all on the brilliant, dedicated folks of rarbgtor and is what made the site the best in the world. nothing else even approaches it. like OiNk wiithout the drama. i'll remember the time spent there with gratitude and fondness. and I just installed two more 20TB drives, less than 18 hours ago...
RARBG, one of the world's largest torrent sites, has said "farewell" to millions of users. The site, which was a prominent and stable source of new movie and TV show releases, cited a variety of reasons behind its decision to cease operations. The surprise shutdown marks the end of an era.
Founded in 2008, RARBG evolved to become a key player in the torrent ecosystem.
The site didn’t only attract millions of monthly visitors from all over the globe, it was also a major release hub, bridging the gap between the Scene and the broader pirate public.
... etc.
676 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadWe would like to inform you that we have decided to shut down our site. The past 2 years have been very difficult for us - some of the people in our team died due to covid complications, others still suffer the side effects of it - not being able to work at all. Some are also fighting the war in Europe - ON BOTH SIDES. Also, the power price increase in data centers in Europe hit us pretty hard. Inflation makes our daily expenses impossible to bare. Therefore we can no longer run this site without massive expenses that we can no longer cover out of pocket. After an unanimous vote we've decided that we can no longer do it.
We are sorry :(
Bye
Edit: This isn't me BTW. I just copy-pasted the text from the site.
Archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230531105653/https://rarbg.to/...
Your efforts did not go unnoticed and you will be greatly missed.
I hope the circumstances of your lives improve and that you can find normality in these difficult times.
Not one person playing both sides (but that probably happens, too).
How much would it have helped to have 1% of users chip in 10 USD/year? (1% is probably optimistic, but still...)?
https://btdig.com
https://bt4g.org
Do they also search private indexers?
Some private trackers do not set the "disallow DHT" flag, so those will be indexed as well. Most do, however, and it's impossible to scrape those without an account, yes
rarbg was my go to for years :S
This is usually done to make it harder for the courts to force providers to block these sites. Whack-a-mole..
PS: Why am I getting downvoted? Try clicking on the links, you will see the same goodbye message.
Edit: Oh the first 2 do seem to be clones, now I understand. The rest are proxies though. I do think even the clones basically skived off the original's database though so I doubt they will have much going forward.
Only 1337x is really a different site.
I'll always be amazed by warez subculture and how they name stuff :))
these are NOT clones, they host different torrents (rarbg never hosted qxr stuff from 1337x).
> https://rarbgmirror.org https://rarbgget.org https://rarbgaccessed.org
these are redirects, and so they are offline too.
> https://www.1377x.to/
this is a clone of 1337x, with added shit on top - do not visit.
I'm still curious how it's possible to run such global illegal operations without being exposed or caught.
How is it still possible to remain anonymous on the Internet, considering in this age the thing is very mature and well commercialised?
Perhaps because copyright infringement is not really a criminal issue but more of a civil law one. Without a private party starting lawsuits on behalf of the copyright owners there is nothing happening. It could be they don't have one.
What about the right of the privacy of communication? Oh, right, it's the state-owned postal services that have to respect that right, and only with regards to the paper letters, not the privately operated ISPs that can (and obliged to) wiretap at the slightest suspicion of crime.
Initially the plan was to ban those people from internet for a period of that but it got removed since it was anticonstitutional.
- Germany sends letters and fines
- Czech Republic doesn’t send letters or fines
- The Netherlands doesn’t send letters or fines (unless you share an absolutely ludicrous amount)
- Belgium doesn’t send letters or fines
- UK sends letters and fines
- France sends letters (tiny chance of a fine)
- Switzerland doesn’t send letters or fines
ISPs do that, but it's a lot worse if you consider your mobile provider to be an ISP.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/07/10/data-brok...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/nepxbz/i-gave-a-bounty-hunte...
The Dutch ISPs fought this in court but they lost in some cases.
Lobbying is always happening to require ISPs to cooperate though.
Seriously, screw Germany here. The way they oppressively Gestapo your internet traffic just to catch you downloading an mp3 to treat you like criminal menace, is unheard of in the rest of Europe.
Can't believe the so called "privacy conscious" German public are okay with this invasiveness of their internet privacy when they're the only EU country as hardcore on this "issue".
If only they would invest as much resources in digital innovation as they do in catching people download a DVD rip, Germany would rule the tech world.
They got rid of the laws that targeted people by race and background, but they never bothered to dispose of the jack boots.
I don't think it's expensive, once you've the software: 1- regularly pull the torrent IDs from the latest releases on most popular torrenting website 2- download and stream the movies 3- wait for German IPs to connect 4- filter out IPs behind a VPN 5- identify the IP provider 6- send the request, probably by Email 7- profit
Not sure how advanced the software, but I don't see much manual input needed, it must be actually very lucrative
> Can't believe the so called "privacy conscious" German public are okay with this invasiveness
Nothing against Germans but there is a lot of hypocrisy in their society: - Energiewende vs. shutting down Nuclear Plants and turning on Coal - Green cars vs. 300km/h on the Autobahn - Go to a restaurant in a big German city, guys tell you they don't accept cards, then hand write the bill on a napkin (...) vs. Greece where restaurants are legally obliged to accept cards and if they don't, then you can just walk out without paying (!..) (all this since the EU driven by Germany bailed Greece out)
https://www.domstol.se/patent--och-marknadsdomstolen/om-pate...
Maybe it's changed in very recent times, I wouldn't know.
https://torrentfreak.com/vietnam-could-kill-several-major-pi...
Potential Impact on Major Pirate Sites as Vietnam ISPs Face New Responsibilities, May 12, 2023.
> “Most Voluminous” Copyright Decree Ever Issued in Vietnam
> Global IP services firm Rouse reports that with 8 chapters and 116 articles, Decree 17 is the most voluminous copyright decree ever issued in Vietnam.
> “[T]he Copyright Decree provides significantly detailed guidance on copyright enforcement, especially which disputes can be classified as a copyright dispute, how to establish acts of copyright infringement, and how to calculate damages caused by infringements,” the company reports.
> “The long, detailed section in copyright assessment is also expected to pave the way for the growth of the currently limited copyright assessment services in Vietnam.”
https://torrentfreak.com/potential-impact-on-major-pirate-si...
That all said, I'm always amazed that these sites don't just move to i2p/tor. The torrents themselves have been decentralized with DHT and magnet links for awhile. At the end of the day it seems like they've just been hanging on trying to avoid being so in the shadows that they get less traffic as a result.
We're so instructed we've gotta wear ad-blockers.
indeed. as it should, if it's relevant for the search.
No. If you pay attention there can be a message at the bottom of the search results telling you how many results were removed due to takedown requests. IIRC, they used to even link directly to the request, but now I think you have to jump through hoops to see it.
The "loophole" is that a takedown request has to be for a specific URL, so it requires a lot of constant effort to even try to get them all. Pirate Bay always had dupes and a million mirrors.
but in the case of Google linking to the pirate bay, isn't the pirate bay the one linking to the pirated content? Google is 1 step removed in that node graph because they are just linking to the pirate bay.
I guess if they directly linked to a pirate bay page that had a magent link on it .... maybe (?)
Also, Google's takedown request handling in Google Search is not a matter of DMCA or a legal matter at all - instead, it's like Content ID, where they have their own system for evaluating takedown requests separate from any law. Rights-holders can still send Google legal requests, but it's easier to go through the expedited processes Google provides that also won't increase rights-holders' liability if they happen to submit a false takedown.
Instead of removing, they just remove links by request.
Sources: https://torrentfreak.com/google-opposes-whole-site-removal-o... and https://www.scribd.com/document/286275022/TorrentFreak-Googl...
-
However they did ban Pirate Bay in the Netherlands after a Dutch court ordered them.
https://www.makeuseof.com/why-google-removed-pirate-bay-from...
But there's also another fundamental difference: even if there's the expectation of removing all copies of the same exact file, it is "trivial" for MegaUpload to know, by using hashes. They do have access to all files, as it is in their servers.
For Google to delete all pirate links to movie X it would be much more complicated, and would put them on a position of being forced to be the internet police.
not if they have the encrypted content only, and the decode key is only in the hash portion of a url, which never goes to a server.
But i guess crafting a technocal "solution" to a legal problem doesn't work, since the law works off intentions, and how much money you pay lawyers...
While I don't doubt that a torrent link shows up once in awhile, Google no longer usefully searches for such things. Or really anything, legal or not. It's more like a purchase recommendation system pretending to be a search engine.
Bing and Yandex will get you most everything you want.
At the bottom there is a message that says "In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 4 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at LumenDatabase.org" and links to https://lumendatabase.org/notices/27615507
I'm in Canada though. But I did use Google.com.
edit: it's also for a "proxy" site. I don't really use torrents or follow TPB happenings and don't know how that is/isn't affiliated.
Here's a guide to the legal status of torrents here with broad categories, from most lenient to most strict (caution VPN spam): https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/torrents-illegal-update-count...
Interesting to note that downloading copyrighted content for personal use is explicitly legal (not just overlooked) in Spain, Switzerland, and Poland.
[0]: https://annas-archive.org/copyright
For smaller players, they'd have to think really carefully about whether they want to engage in multi-year litigation with them.
Google has paid something like 10 billions dollars of fines in the EU during the last decade. I don’t think they are giving the run around to anyone.
Meanwhile, Google will just keep on Googling...
Google does not store files it should not.
Like saying a site mentioning that you should look for “cannabis” if you want to get high is illegal. Selling the substance is illegal, telling you how it’s called isn’t.
It is surprising to hear because as a user they _seem_ like a link. Copy the link into something and get the (illegal) files.
Here's a random RARBG magnet link that may or may not work
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:468043aa374080fed5ff65e4cd8d4fed002986b5&dn=Rizzoli.And.Isles.S05.1080p.WEBRip.x265-RARBG
It doesn't link to a file or embed any tracker names but it does name a 1080p HEVC (x265) encoded season pack of season 5 of a US police procedural drama (which is excess and unrequired but humans do like readable names)
What it does provide is a unique hash code that matches the exact torrent ... should you find it.
When you add that magnet link to your torrent client it triggers the act of polling any public trackers your client knows about and any peers that have "hit me up about magnets" enabled.
Ideally word spreads and eventually some other client | tracker hits you back with word of other peers that at least have some cannabis .. (err, bits of Rizzoli&Isles Season 5 HEVC pack).
I wonder if they ‘stand up in court’ and/or have ever been tested too.
To actually find the content in question you take the link, go on a peer to peer network, and basically ask machines if they have the content in question available or know where it is. There's various ways to do that, in some cases your torrent app might know the location of some centralized "tracker" servers, and ask those servers whether they know locations for those files. Some torrents are "trackerless" and use a DHT, a type of distributed database that keeps information about where to find files.
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/API_GetObjec...
Not quite the same but PeerTube is P2P legitimate hosting.
I run a PeerTube instance myself and I like it a lot.
Entertaining hypothetical edge cases to examine an argument's soundness has become extremely aggressive behaviour?
Anyway, my apologies.
For example, would it be offensive to say that a feather and a hammer will fall at the same speed on the moon to take down the Aristotle's theory of gravity? Is it OK to not talk about that kind of stuff in order not to offend Aristotletes?
but normies are generally freaked out, because they are not used to real talk. i often crash into this barrier of non-sense talk for the sake of conversation as well, very painful for both sides.
i'm sure aristotle wouldn't be offended but encouraged :)
Texans would say "y'all" :)
Yawn.
realizing that most of anything isn't special does not preclude every thing beeing uniqe and valuable
Aristotle Scholar: You know, I'm actually glad you asked this, because these kind of "gotcha" questions show everyone the unfortunate state of journalism today, its disrespect for scholarship, and its willingness to peddle whatever trash that people are circulating in order to undermine our institutions. [wrestles wooden microphone off lapel and storms off set.]
People get offended when you're asking bad faith questions. And it can be difficult to differentiate the two, especially when people discussing don't know each other.
I know someone who is often snippy with me because I ask questions where I legitimately want to understand something, but she assumes I'm asking to indicate she's done something wrong.
I had never heard of RARBG before, so I don't know if they were legitimate and you are being sarcastic or serious?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35639370
Worst case if they had enough money they could rent somewhere and pay for a decent internet connection and not actually live there, so only the equipment would be seized.
This doesn't count the issues with a site that is very popular, from bandwidth to even simple database search overhead. If I were to guess, it's that RarBG probably spent in excess of $10k/month, which isn't much if you're a startup with a runway of VC capital or a revenue stream, it's a lot more if you're in a smaller country or don't have an excess of revenue.
Most of the time, these services aren't done in direct exchange for money or from people who have a lot of money in the first place.
So what ends up happening is even if they can avoid the shallow legal issues by remaining private, they then run into the problem that nobody can pay for the service (not many options for providing that transaction privately). You might think "just run ads" but the problem there is multifaceted, most are likely going to be using adblockers, on top of that to remain private they'll be locked out of most paying ads and only get the most spammy garbage incentivizing more to use adblocker to visit the site.
am 100% okay moving the risk to the operation/operator
"Sir, is it time for us to claim to have corporate values?"
"Not yet, m'boy, we are still swimming in our private ocean of profits!"
Because at the core, identity on the internet is not well defined. Authentication is a hard problem. You might wonder why it's hard, why better more secure protocols haven't emerged. Answer: that makes end to end encryption easy, among other things that give individuals too much power.
-
deep-fake assassinations are going to be a thing...
PHKahler
You can get away with quite a bit just by being silent, and for longer than you'd think. A big way that people get away with things for so long is just by not answering questions. Someone says, "Is this [illegal thing] yours" and you say nothing. Now you've got to burn hours and dollars trying to prove someone owns something so that you can go after them.
You'll find domains, web hosts, countries, and employees who are all onboard with the same philosophy. When everything requires a subpoena at the highest level to move something forward, it can easily take years for anything to happen at all. Some countries are known for having slow legal systems. Stack jurisdictions with slow court systems and you can start with an 18 month window before anything can happen.
You've got a domain in Tonga registered to a company in another country, owned by a large company in another country owned by a trust in a third country. Often small countries with limited resources and archaic or corrupt bureaucracies. And where is it hosted? That's probably another connect the dots. And the site can change hands and then you have to start all over again. Are you going to refocus on the new owner or are you going to spend even more resources trying to track down the former owner?
And any of these entities may lead to nothing more than a mule, fake person, or dead person. Sure, it's someone's fault for having inaccurate records—but who? How long has this been going on? Did they know? Was it intentional? It shouldn't be like this, but it is… what do you do now? Are you going to go after the recordkeeper too?
You can do illegal shit for years or even decades if you just say nothing and respond to no one.
The opposite is the German approach. Shower the cuntiest lawyers with money, lobby for laws allowing to easily pick a victim, bully the victim senseless. Lobby even more and if someone uses the word "corruption" in context of copyrights, bully the shit out of them as well. I'm so glad Anglosphere and German copyrights predators have been perfectly impotent for so many years. They know how to create faceless enemies.
A law firm would be useful in (a) applying to remove illegal content, (b) seize any profit generated by illegal use of clents' content, (c) (if the client requests) horrify users identified of such illegal services, (d) pressure the authorities to crack down on the operation.
Most lawyers do not understand the technical details. We do a hell of a good job of understanding experts' findings and put them in a clear legal structure though.
Most of the boring but billable job I ever made was searching through company registries, google searches, sanctions searches, panama papers searches, reviewing countless pdfs to either (i) mark them as privileged so they cannot be used as evidence, (ii) scan whether there are any documents that may directly implicate the client and if so try to find a way to legally claim it is unusable.
I believe law firms do provide decent service. Billables are there, but no lawyer I know would willingly generate busywork that does not lead anywhere to charge more. OTOH, I HAVE seen instances where a work got reviewed multiple times by different lawyers, because the client was willing to pay more. But even in these edge cases, multiple reviews did benefit the client and they received a better work product.
My advice would be establish a good working relationship with a lawyer in the firm that you trust, continuously send work. Ask estimates if you are on a tight budget. But do not be cheap and try to get things done with less budget. Law firms provide a service you need, if you pay them decently you'll receive your money's worth. Lawyers will literally take a bullet for you to make things happen when you need them.
Apologies for the long rant :).
What’s the order of magnitude here? There have been times in my life where I would have found having a lawyer on standby to be incredibly helpful (e.g. car purchase gone bad, property usage rights dispute, etc.), but at the same time spending $100k a year to have a lawyer on standby to resolve an issue of $5-10k in magnitude is foolish.
I am also talking about corporate law work. Maintaining corporate records, lease agreements, employment agremeents, director changes et.
A lot of people will be surprised by knowing what kind of businesses is ran from that shabby house in the corner by visibly low life mate driving 30yo celica.
Because it is not obviously illegal. A tracker just points to the content, not the content itself. That may seem meaningless, but then so are the arbitrary demands of copyright holders. They want to have their cake and eat it too. So the system works as intended.
Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse.
Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel, allowing the existence of legal, paid streaming sites a-la-Spotify with access to 99% of the repertoire. Until then, torrent is how we protest while they create more and more insular streaming services to milk people $9/mo at a time.
"Piracy is almost always a service problem." — Gabe Newell
(If you need a semi-private tracker that's easy to get into, try TorrentLeech. Also /r/opensignups)
1. Too expensive. This encompasses several varieties, like the media in question being literally priced more than the person is willing to pay, or the pricing is acceptable, but the person can buy only one of several choices and wants to evaluate all before giving one their money.
2. The product is not offered for sale. This is sometimes literally that the product isn't available for sale in your country, or the product is not available in a useful form, e.g. it doesn't come with subtitles in your language, it won't work on your device, it requires a stable internet connection, which you don't have, etc.
3. For political reasons, to avoid supporting DRM.
pirating is in this case the best solution as I can pick the quality I want, with the audio and subtitle languages I need.
For example, Nintendo consoles have been unavailable since the 90s — which is why we've been using these clones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendy_(console)
and are still unavailable now unless you're willing to buy consoles and games on ebay, overpriced and without warranty (which is what some of my friends have been doing, but I refuse to support publishers that consider my American dollars second class to those coming from actual Americans).
So torrents it is, then. 'Fuck you' can go both ways.
Disney holding back the second half of the final season of Amphibia. Released in the US but not here for unexplained reasons. For 6 months piracy was the only way to get a conclusion.
Our Flag Means Death, even though it had a large section of its cast from Britain it wasn't available to watch for far too long here.
I could go on, but you get the point. Any distribution rules are a creation of their own making in the first place.
This is very much a practical reason as well, though this overlaps with "not available in a usable form". DRM is the reason I can't watch movies at the highest bitrates and resolutions on my device from Netflix or Amazon. It's the reason I can't trust that things I purchase will be available to me indefinitely. It's the reason I can't build a collection of media (e.g. with Kodi) that is playable on my TV with one click with a single unifying interface.
> The product is not offered for sale.
This extends to some other cases as well. For instance, where the only available version is a crappy remaster (Terminator 2), and the original is much superior. Or if you want to watch the film with a director's commentary.
There's also, very broadly, a 4th reason - convenience. This encompasses both ease of use (if I know what movie I want to watch, I don't have to search to see where it's streaming), and discoverability (a good torrent site will easily let you see all the movies by a director or actor, and provide recommendations). Or if you're looking for a particular special feature, it's much more convenient to be able to download it than to go looking for a physical media copy and wait for it to be shipped to your door.
Then the Netflix catalog shrunk to originals, there's now 6 different streaming services I have to juggle to watch the usual content my family likes, and we're constantly using third-party services just to figure out what's available where. I hate having to switch from Netflix to Hulu to finish out a show because the last season is only on Hulu. Or things like Warner and Disney cutting shows because they don't want to pay residuals or whatever dumb accounting BS they feel like pulling.
If you make it more convenient to torrent and shove everything into Plex, why would I pay to get a worse experience.
If the supply of torrented content dries up, it seems like many Plex shares will start to become very stale.
> o7 thank you for your service
(o7 would be a salute)
> Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse.
False and nonsense, especially in 2023.
> Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel...
Okay, I'll stop here.
I'm fine with piracy, personally. I'd prefer we just admit that you're mostly using it to download movies, music, and television shows for free. This isn't some noble fight for freedom. We're talking about watching mindless bullshit content like Star Wars, without paying for it. Piracy proponents, and comments like the one starting this thread, make it seem like we're entitled to this content. We're not. But I'll admit, I don't watch much in the way of tv or movies any more anyway, so the whole debate is lost on me.
I just rolled my eyes at the ridiculous tone of that comment, like they're freedom fighters. It's self-important bullshit.
It goes both ways. There are no Saints to be found on either side.
I don't care one bit about the pocketbooks of our corporate overlords, and neither should you.
I take my kids to the movies. I subscribe to services like Apple Music and TV+, and HBO Max. We watch YouTube videos where there's sponsored content in them. We buy officially licensed merchandise like clothing and toys. We buy books, both physical and digital.
And, frankly, it doesn't matter what I do personally. Millions, hell billions, of people around the world do as well.
If artists are struggling it's because they're not getting paid properly by the corporations they work for, like Disney, Netflix, and others. It's not because of individuals like you or me or the people that run piracy sites.
This is false. Artists get paid residuals, meaning, per sale, so every non-sale due to piracy is literally coming out of artists' pockets.
Sometimes I pirate it, sometimes I buy it. Sometimes I consume something free instead. Sometimes I pay for the stuff I don't consume at all. But the substitution is always in the direction of cheaper, more available solution. Never in the direction of buying something.
There were cases however when me pirating something eventually turned into a sale or even few sales.
It's truly bizarre that so many techies complain about the "cost" of artistic works while they sip their $20 lattes and go to their six-figure jobs with ergonomic chairs and free snacks.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...
What's bizzare is that some of those rich people you mention actually internalized corporate made morality toward "intelectual property" and proselytize it as if that was their full time job.
To them piracy is and always has been theft, the way that Santa is wearing and has always been wearing red.
They are paid. If they're not paid enough then that's on the companies behind the production of those shows and movies.
These corporations make billions. Piracy isn't hurting them. However, these corporations are causing harm to society. It doesn't make sense to white knight for them.
I'll add, since I'm not the person you were replying to, I don't care about who gets paid what. I don't care if the actors get paid or not. All I care about is some basic consistency if we're going to have morals about anything. Is it wrong to steal? Yes? Then piracy is wrong. (Or, no? Then let's skip this conversation entirely, you are my enemy.) Yeah, piracy is pretty easy. Yeah, it feels harmless when we do it. Should individuals get fined tens of thousands of dollars for infractions? No. But I'd say it's about as wrong as stealing a loaf of bread from a grocery store. To pretend it's a noble cause is transparent garbage, and unless you can pose an argument that doesn't complain about how much corporations make, I'm not interested.
There appears to be nothing underpinning your worldview for why the industry you work in ought not allow open thievery, but this one should. Yes, their corporations make billions of dollars, just like in every other industry where theft is not tolerated. Or perhaps you support open thievery everywhere at any time, in which case, like I said, you are my enemy.
On the flip side, these corporations take from society and refuse to give back thanks to ridiculously long copyright protection terms.
They take advantage of their workers, paying a fraction of a penny to them that they make.
They screw artists over with bad contracts or lousy residuals.
They defraud investors by purposely producing works they know won't perform well.
They use things like the DMCA to bankrupt anyone that tries to write software that gets around DRM.
They threaten to sue people into oblivion that use P2P software to download something they "own."
They cover up the crimes of pedophiles and other sexual predators because they make them money.
So, again, I don't care about the pocketbooks of these corporations. I don't care that someone can download a movie without paying for it. I don't care that groups like rarbg or TPB exist.
> you are my enemy
This is exactly the type of thing an internet white knight would write. You're ridiculous.
> This is exactly the type of thing an internet white knight would write. You're ridiculous.
I'm responding to a comment that is defending another comment that said:
> o7 thank you for your service
> Where one piracy site dies, a thousand spawn from its corpse.
Et cetera. Have a nice day, enemy.
Cool. Brushing off what I wrote instead of addressing it. Good job.
> I'm responding to a comment that is defending another comment
Then perhaps you should respond to that comment instead.
> Have a nice day, enemy.
Ah, never mind, you were in fact responding to me.
Farewell, Ser White Knight.
Ridiculous.
Sorry to be picky, but I think it's important to remember that intellectual "property" rights are a legal construct that societies create in an attempt to make society as a whole richer by encouraging creativity. I worry that overuse of metaphors like "property" and "theft" elevate IP to a god-given commandment (thou shalt not steal), obscuring the fact that we should design our intellectually property rights to ensure they're doing what we want. Enriching creators is not an end goal in itself.
And I find it hard to believe that the spirit of these laws was intended to target end-users who copy something to watch for their own personal enjoyment, rather than to target people who copied works in an attempt to earn a profit personally. The only way the punishment fits the crime is in the latter situation, IMO. Yet I assume the laws are applied more frequently to the former situation.
Using open source software is stealing because in fairness somebody has to pay software developers.
Also watching ads and not buying the product is stealing because somebody has to pay the actors in those ads and people who make those ads.
They even had to go through one level of indirection to make people believe what they made up.
They couldn't just say, watching digital copy witout paying for it is a theft because people would just laugh at them, no it's not.
They had to do a two step process through obsure old crime to confuse people. Using a digital copy without paying for it is piracy. And piracy is theft.
Consuming didgital content on your own terms has as much to do with theft as it has with actual piracy that got some resurgence around Africa in recent years.
Maybe that's a bad thing. Having one central site rather than many is better for searching and availability of uploads.
Once again; the media companies are absolutely doing everything in their power to drive even casual media consumers into piracy. I wouldn't be surprised if piracy was already more rampant than it's ever been - but it's only getting worse, due to ludicrous streaming fragmentation.
It'll never happen, but the only thing that can save piracy is an aggregate all-inclusive monthly subscription platform where all the films/shows from all services are available, just like Apple Music or Spotify. I pay $30-40/mo and I have access to all the stuff on Netflix, Prime, Max, Disney...
When you stream a movie from Netflix, they get the credit. Disney? The same.
Nobody is going to pay for all these services, and more and more are ditching them altogether. The response of the streaming services is to increase prices and reduce content. It's hilariously embarrassing. They are asking us to pirate.
I find this an odd argument in favor of pirating movies, because everything that steam offers for games, amazon prime or itunes offers for most tv shows and movies. In fact with amazon prime you can buy content and watch it on pretty much any kind of device out there.
Netflix was killing pirating when it had "everything", pirating is seeing a resurgence as the landscape becomes more fractured.
I have been hearing people make this same basic argument since the 90s. (I'm sure it's older than that.) During that time the price of video and audio entertainment has decreased while availability and quality have vastly improved. Despite this, piracy is still going strong. The ideological goalposts used to justify it keep moving, but the desire for free stuff is timeless. (Not judging here -- I've certainly done my share.)
Adjusting for inflation: Twenty years ago, a DVD with one recent movie cost ~$30, or you could rent one for $5-8. One album on CD cost ~$20. Buying individual songs for the then-unheard of price of $1.65 (99 cents at the time) on iTunes was brand new. They had limited bit rate and DRM, and you had to buy an expensive iPod if you wanted to use them conveniently. If you wanted good TV shows, you paid something like $60-80/month for cable TV (more if you wanted to watch The Sopranos) and had to watch on a schedule, with lots of ads.
If you compare that to today's world of cheap streaming services, high-quality DRM-free music, and even cheaper physical media, it's not even a contest.
And cable TV or films at the cinema are as expensive as ever.
Which is why Spotify has had an incredible success worldwide and music piracy has reduced dramatically: their repertoire is very comprehensive and mostly the same everywhere in the world.
People really want to believe it is a money issue, and they are just terribly misguided. Gabe Newell is absolutely right here, and he knows piracy, as he deals with the demographic with expensive needs (gamers wanting the latest $70 game) and the least money (as young gamers don't have a job, or don't earn a lot)
It is not a money problem.
Well, i recently got myself a videoprojector with an android tv included, and since i happen to have an amazon prime account, i installed the app, which is quite good.
And yes, it's true, since i've done that, my torrentz usage has dramatically dropped..
So yeah, I went back to torrents after that. All of my problems disappeared when I just had an MP4 file I could play anywhere. I'm still paying my subscription but they can take my 1080p video from my cold dead hands.
But that doesn't really disprove my point : when the legal streaming service is working fine, then it does have an immediate effect on pirated content consumption.
I thought that not being able to have access to all the content in the world would be a no-go, but i'm surprising myself preferring to watch legal content directly in two taps of the remote than having to search for the torrentz, the subtitles, download it, plug the computer to my projector, etc.
This came as a surprise to me.
Hopefully the industry gets its shit together so I can legally watch shows and movies without waiting a week and so I don't need to consult two different "look up where you can stream something please don't pirate" websites to watch shows anymore. Until that magical day comes, I'll keep pirating.
legal streaming is horrible at the moment.
To be able to battle at least some of the reasons to pirate media they need to fix a couple of things (and this is just my shortlist, there's 1000+ more reasons) - allow indexing and playback outside of the official app so 1 app could be used for multiple platform subscriptions - allow access to content no matter where the viewer is on the world. Not only the video, but audio and subtitle languages as well - allow subscriptions for specific content, not a 'one subscription fits all'. I dont want to watch nor pay for yet another Walking Dead something, but I do want to watch See - allow to buy content, and provide that DRM free in high quality (not the streaming quality)
These are the "bad legal streaming services" that OP is mentioning.
Ease of use and guaranteed video & subtitles quality can compensate to some degree to not having access to all the content in the world.
If you treat streaming like old cable television; you turn it on then decide what you want to watch from what is available, I guess it might seem fine to you. But if you try to decide what you want to watch first, treating streaming as a means to an end rather than the end itself, then streaming is unmitigated trash.
seems like rutracker.org (ex torrents.ru) is gonna outlive everybody
- js.
Iconic Torrent Site RARBG Shuts Down, All Content Releases Stop
https://torrentfreak.com/iconic-torrent-site-rarbg-shuts-dow...
Guess I'll have to subscribe to a USENET after all.