RARBG one of the most trafficked torrent sites shutdown on June 1st.

[Karl_Alves]

Summary

The surprise shutdown of torrent site RARBG and its tracker came as a shock to millions of users. The popular torrent site had millions of daily users spread across several domain names. This included the flagship .to domain which currently displays a farewell message. The site was 15 years old and actively had more monthly users than even The Pirate Bay.

 

Quotes

Quote

"RARBG, one of the world’s largest and iconic pirate torrent trackers, has abruptly shut down after running 15 years on the Internet"

 

"The website owners on Wednesday posted a goodbye message on the site’s front page and bid farewell to millions of its monthly visitors from all over the world.

The team cited various reasons for the shutdown, including the death of some staff due to COVID-19 or COVID-related health problems, the rising cost of operations, financial difficulties, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine that had members fighting on both sides."
 

 

My thoughts

Very saddened by it personally... You could full sized files for games, movies and more it had 4K(HDR)x265 files which almost no other torrenting site offered. 

On the surface, RARBG looked like any other torrent site but it was one of the few platforms to release a steady stream of fresh content. All pirated movies and TV-shows come from somewhere and RARBG acted as a key bridge between scene sources and the public at large. The surprise shutdown of torrent site RARBG and its tracker came as a shock to millions of users and the knock-on effects are already being felt elsewhere in the piracy ecosystem. Other torrent sites are seeing a slowdown in fresh content, automated download apps are starting to throw up errors, and many of the largest streaming sites are missing a key source of content.

 

Sources
RARBG Shutdown is a Major Blow to the Pirate Ecosystem * TorrentFreak
Torrent Site RARBG Shuts Down, Ceases Operations (techworm.net)
RARBG Torrents , films , download

[TetraSky]

Sad day for pirates everywhere.

But... Even if they took it down themselves instead being taken down legally, like a hydra, cut one head and two more sprout out from it.

[Fasterthannothing]

That's pretty wild but I guarantee you in 3 months or so no one will notice their gone. The high seas keep spreading it seems like even when one is closed.

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, Fasterthannothing said:

That's pretty wild but I guarantee you in 3 months or so no one will notice their gone. The high seas keep spreading it seems like even when one is closed.

How many people even knew about it's existence?

 

Anyways, nothing of value was lost. No honor among thieves.

[HarryNyquist]

55 minutes ago, Kisai said:

How many people even knew about it's existence?

Plenty of people knew about it and used it. They had the good high-quality stuff. Now it'll be fun trying to sift through the virus laden ones or finding a private tracker to use.

[dilpickle]

I love how we're just openly discussing pirating in this thread. 

[TetraSky]

4 hours ago, dilpickle said:

I love how we're just openly discussing pirating in this thread. 

Well, it IS permitted as per the CS. As long as we don't start talking about how or where to find alternatives to rarbg anyway. 

Spoiler

Quote

Piracy, Hacking, and other Illegal Activities

• Discussion on how to engage in piracy is not allowed.
  • Redistribution of copyrighted material, including links to third party hosting sites, is not permitted.
  • Discussion of piracy in general is acceptable (e.g. "Game X becomes the most pirated game ever").
  • Hackintosh discussion is permitted.
• Discussion on engaging in hacking or cracking is not allowed, including:
  • Bypassing security features, restrictions, or filters (including parental filters, school restrictions, or workplace monitoring), including on your own device.
• Any illegal content or discussion on engaging in illegal activities is not permitted. Canadian law applies, as well as any jurisdictions that apply to you.

Honestly, I hadn't used or thought about rarbg for the last few years. Too many of the torrents there resulted in pretty little "Notice concerning illegal downloading" from my ISP. Games go on sale frequently enough and movies get released really quickly digitally on one platform or another these days. Just need to have some patience.

[jagdtigger]

On 6/3/2023 at 10:55 AM, TetraSky said:

like a hydra, cut one head and two more sprout out from it

Pretty much this, the media industry is so out of touch its not funny anymore......

[TetraSky]

28 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Pretty much this, the media industry is so out of touch its not funny anymore......

Yup, the media industry will not win this "war". They may win a few battles here and there, but overall, they will not win.

Unless of course they start lobbying harder in every countries in a push for more draconian laws, steeper fines and consequences... Good luck with that I guess. Everything except providing a better service that isn't needlessly region locked I guess.

Currently in Canada, it's not even legally sound to sue an individual for copyright infringement (unless they were selling pirated copies and benefitting financially from it). The maximum amount copyright holders can get from an individual is $5k. Which doesn't even covers their lawyer fees. All they can do, is send us pretty letters through our ISPs if they find our IP is associated with someone downloading a torrent.

https://www.heerlaw.com/damages-ip-infringement

Spoiler

Quote

If the infringement was for non-commercial purposes, then a court may award from $100 to $5,000 in statutory damages for all infringements relating to all works in issue – the award cannot exceed $5,000, regardless of the number of works infringed.

 

Just for funsies, I looked around now that we're pretty much a few days after the site went down.

A ton of new sites showed up from the ashes, many with similar names and interface to rarbg (to get the traffic). Wasn't even hard to find.
And that's with them willingly closing the site down themselves. Had it actually been taken down legally, I bet there would be even more just to be spiteful.

[jagdtigger]

6 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

Unless of course they start lobbying harder in every countries in a push for more draconian laws, steeper fines and consequences... Good luck with that I guess.

Well they could certainly try, but then pirates would go submarine-mode with tor then. The media industry will have a ton of "fun" dealing with that.....

[GOTSpectrum]

No matter the reason for this shutdown, for the media companies and the rest of them, music labels, game devs, even writers and whatnot, it's a game of whack-a-mole, just look at TPB and how long it took to get that to point where it wasn't really usable for most people anymore. 

 

I don't pirate, haven't in many many years, between becoming an adult with an income and the massive number of sales and a handful of subscriptions I just don't feel the need. But with that said I can, and do understand the reason behind it. Not everyone has the means to pay even if they wanted too, on top of that there are just some people who for better or for worse don't feel like the creators deserve the amount of money they ask. 

 

I think this is for a range of reasons but part of it is we don't really understand the amount of work that goes into a movie, a game, a piece of music in the same way that we do a book. A written piece of text that is 60k works long is obviously a massive endeavour, but we don't see the thousands of lines of code, the hours of 3d modelling, or the take after take of the same scene of a movie. We see finished products that we can complete in days or weeks. It's easy to lose sight of just the sheer number of people-hours that goes into the likes of modern media such as games, movies, music etc. 

[freeagent]

I haven't torrented for a few years, but I used to use this site, amongst others towards the end.

 

I first got on the internet in my own home in 2002.. its crazy how much the internet has changed since then. It is so regulated now. It used to be the wild west out here. Reinstall XP while connected to your cable modem still? Bam greeted to a Trojan when windows is done installing

 

Ahh the good ol days.

[Kisai]

10 hours ago, GOTSpectrum said:

I don't pirate

Sure Jan.

 

I'd bet money that every single person on this forum has pirated something in their life, either because they wanted it, out of spite, or because it wasn't sold in their country/language. Or maybe they pirated something out of conveniece, because media-shifting takes time and specialized hardware.

 

During the 80's and 90's. Piracy was a lot bigger because the distribution system for music, videos and games was gatekept by whatever the local store wanted to sell. If you happen to live out in the boonies, you were more likely to pirate things because that's just how "country folk" do things. Borrowing a computer game is on the same level as borrowing someone's lawnmower. So you take a game or a tape home and make a crappy copy for yourself so you don't have to keep imposing on your friend/neighbor.

 

Anti-piracy measures like laser holes on floppies, macrovision on VHS tapes and later DVD's, and proprietary cartridges are aimed squarely at country-folk pirates so they don't get the bright idea of opening up their own rental store using pirate copies of things.

 

Less y'all forget, you used to be able to rent physical games and videos until digital distribution killed them all. Even in Japan, you could rent CD's (something that never caught on in the west, likely for exactly the same reason, anyone who did was threatened with copyright lawsuits.)

 

What has happened around the 90's was the uptick in piracy before digital distribution, this was due to the availability of the internet. Suddenly people were able to dive into other countries piracy markets and discover all the weird stuff they had never knew existed because ... you guessed it big media companies didn't think there was a market for it (eg Anime, JRPG's, European indie filmes, etc) Netflix capitalized on this pretty late in the game, but proved there were consumers for this stuff. Up until Netflix, the only way to watch anime was to pirate it. The only way to play new JRPG's was to pirate it. The only way to watch Euro indie films was to pirate it, etc.  This remained so until at least the 2008 financial crisis.

 

Suddenly these foreign content things were in direct competition with domestic stuff in the west. The people who had been gatekeeping suddenly had a mad rush to license everything before companies like Netflix could.

 

Which brings us to the present state of piracy. If you can afford it, and you can buy it, you should buy it. If you can not afford it, watch someone else play it/borrow someone elses copy of it. If it's not available to buy in your country either because nobody will license it, or the copyright owner is too bloody incompetent, then they have no right to complain about it being pirated. They are choosing to let the pirates distribute their content by not making it available in any legal form.

 

That has always been the case for Anime, and has always been the case for indie/small-company games, and has always been the case for all asian and latin-america content. Big companies in the west, cater exclusively to trying to sell the most popular, blandest, appeals-to-everyone thing, and ignores the tastes of everyone else.

 

So if a big company isn't going to do it, and a small company doesn't have the distribution platform to so, guess what happens? (Every developer should put every game on Steam available worldwide, even if you don't expect sales of it. Every indie film, musical composition and cartoon should be on Youtube, if not Netflix, and available worldwide.) Not doing so cedes it to the pirates, who will do it anyway and you will lose analytics and any potential revenue from people actually wanting to go out of their way to buy it.

 

The only way you out-compete casual piracy is by making sure that everyone can pay for it if they want to, and you only out-compete spiteful piracy by not attacking your customers. Disney, Warner, Nintendo, Sega, Atlus, all attack their customers, sometimes for reasons that seem more about control than greed, and because of the "potential" to be attacked by these companies for doing things people expect to be able to do with content they have purchased, it makes people go "hmm, well if Nintendo isn't going to respect me anyway, why should it matter if I pay for Mario Bros a 6th time?"

 

[GOTSpectrum]

 

6 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Sure Jan.

 

I'd bet money that every single person on this forum has pirated something in their life, either because they wanted it, out of spite, or because it wasn't sold in their country/language. Or maybe they pirated something out of conveniece, because media-shifting takes time and specialized hardware.

I specifically said I havent in a long time, not that I have never done it... I even gave reasons for why I haven't in a long time... 

[Needfuldoer]

16 minutes ago, GOTSpectrum said:

I specifically said I havent in a long time, not that I have never done it... I even gave reasons for why I haven't in a long time... 

I'm in the same boat. The risk/reward equation looks a lot different when you're in high school and your annual income is from chores, your birthday, and the holidays, than it does when you're a gainfully employed adult.

 

Goodwill, Savers, and especially eBay replaced my itch to sail the high seas. You can save a lot of money through the magic of buying two of them everything secondhand. Mystery packs of 100 discs are also good for a laugh. (Sometimes you even find something halfway decent!)

[GOTSpectrum]

2 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

through the magic of buying two of them

Technology connections fan? 

[Needfuldoer]

18 minutes ago, GOTSpectrum said:

Technology connections fan? 

I was hoping someone would get that...

 

Yup! Technology Connections/Connextras, Ashens, Aging Wheels/Under Dunn, Techmoan, Defunctland, and Oddity Archive are all over my watch history.

 

Why pirate TV shows when there's more quality original content out there than ever?

[Stahlmann]

There will always be pirates, simply because someone can't afford it, might not want to support the creators or because the the legal way is even more inconvenient than pirating. Or like with many very old games there is simply no legal way to play them anymore.

 

The mere existence of Spotify and Steam have probably been the biggest factors that reduced piracy in the game and music industry. But alas, most companies don't see the bigger picture in this and only go after short-term profits over and over again.

 

 

[Gork]

Plenty of youtube show that denuvo causes lag in games., bugs, awful start times, and load times. Even on  high end machines. And that when it's not their, like in GOG versions. Load times improve, varying from some to a lot.  Maybe some day the industry will get the message that malware in games, loses sales. Ironically services from the high seas was the only way I could find to play a few games. I couldn't find one of them on sale anywhere.  A few others so old they used Securom, MS themselves declared that such a danger they disabled it at the OS level. Sites like the one in this thread was how I could play it. Hows that for irony. 

[Gork]

6 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

I was hoping someone would get that...

 

Yup! Technology Connections/Connextras, Ashens, Aging Wheels/Under Dunn, Techmoan, Defunctland, and Oddity Archive are all over my watch history.

 

Why pirate TV shows when there's more quality original content out there than ever?

As to TV shows?  a  few shows I like. aren't for sale, lol, the secret adventures of jules verne  last time I heard won't be for sale till the earth freezes.

[Sauron]

Damn, seems like their team was going through a really rough period. If nothing else I hope they get better.

[RejZoR]

3 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

There will always be pirates, simply because someone can't afford it, might not want to support the creators or because the the legal way is even more inconvenient than pirating. Or like with many very old games there is simply no legal way to play them anymore.

 

The mere existence of Spotify and Steam have probably been the biggest factors that reduced piracy in the game and music industry. But alas, most companies don't see the bigger picture in this and only go after short-term profits over and over again.

 

 

And this is so true. Through convenience of Steam and GOG (not you Epic Games Store), I have stopped pirating games ages ago. Not only that, I've bought almost all games I could on GOG that I pirated in the distant past. I literally cannot be bothered finding games and manually searching for patches and cracks separately for those patches. Steam/GOG just delivers all that seamlessly.

 

Netflix, Disney+, SkyShowTime, HBO on the other hand, so draconian, restricting and clumsy I literally can't bother with them.

[ToboRobot]

If you search for where this news has popped up, you can see how popular the site was.

Massive cultural loss!

[XWAUForceflow]

Yeah, I am surprised this news made it into some mainstream media outlets. I was not aware that the site was that popular and well known. But as others have said, new sites will pop up.

Though it's an interesting shift that they weren't closed by a legal battle but simply because they couldn't support the page anymore. Though if they really faced that many hardships recently I can see why they gave up. As always it will be interesting to see what will come next, though granted some really great sites that existed for a very, very long time did vanish over the years with no adequate replacements. But I guess with the new emergence of the ridiculous amount of streaming services (that are all damn expensive) a new emergence of piracy sites will happen.

I just wish the companies would learn from prior mistakes, but I guess this is too much to ask after all.

[rattacko123]

Does anyone know what encoding settings RARBG used for their x265 videos? They struck the perfect balance between quality and file size for me (and the denoising/degraining was great). Now that RARBG no longer exists I see a need for me to compress my own blu-rays.