If you are a frequent reader of FILEnetworks Blog, you should be familiar with the site Rarbg.com. We’ve posted about this tracker several times in the past and it was even included in our latest private tracker watch update. For those of you who don’t know, RARBG is a huge private torrent tracker with over 40000 indexed torrents and over 100000 registered members. A short while ago, we received an interesting E-mail from the RARBG staff. Quoted below is a part of that E-mail:
We(rarbg.com) have just received a take down notice which we have to comply with within 48 hours. However we are going to move our servers to sweden as fast as we can(1-2 days). The requestor for takedown is brein ( http://www.anti-piracy.nl/english/english.asp).
If you’ve been keeping up with file sharing news in the recent past, the name BREIN [Wikipedia Article] should be familiar enough. They’re a major anti piracy group that has been waging a war against BitTorrent trackers hosted in the Netherlands for the last few years. Although BREIN sent takedown notices to many public and private BitTorrent trackers, most sites simply moved out of the Netherlands and evaded any legal action.
Demonoid, SCC and ArenaBG are just a few examples of popular trackers that are still online despite being targeted by BREIN (SCC was only down for about 9 hours). With RARBG’s plan to move to Sweden, this looks very much like yet another failed attempt to shut the doors of file sharing. Sweden is the home of ‘The Pirate Bay’ crew and as far as we know BitTorrent sites are not illegal according to Swedish law. If you experience any slowdowns or downtime with RARBG.com in the coming days, it will most likely be due to the server move. There is no reason to worry as RARBG sure as hell are not planning to be ‘taken down’.
P.S. – RARBG signups are currently open. If you want to show your support, you can probably start by signing up :D No mandatory ratio requirements!
UPDATE (11/12/2008): We have been informed bu RARBG Staff that the site has now completed the server move. Happy torrenting and long live RARBG.
