RarBG, one of the most famous torrent tracker websites in the world, decided to voluntarily shut down. Launched in 2007, it faced numerous regulatory challenges and scandals throughout its history. All this ended on May 31, 2023, with a short explanation note from its admin.
RarBG is Shut Down
RarBG is a classic torrent tracker website that provides people with P2P downloading links for various content. Well, a uniting characteristic of most of this content was the fact it was pirated. Hundreds and thousands of downloading links to fresh movies, games and programs were shared there. Back in the days when it started, these places were massively popular. And they still are, especially in poor countries. Back-to-back with sites like ThePirateBay and eMule, RarBG was among the largest cyber pirate resources under the sun.
In 2014, on the wave of digital rights laws introduction to the legislation of most developed countries, RarBG faced tough times. One by one, European countries banned access to the website, forcing people to use VPN or proxy servers to access it. Slow-but-steady transfer of people from the use of cracked software towards using licensed one did not help the situation either. However, the events of the 3 recent years brought even worse challenges. One of RarBG admins says the following in the “goodbye” note:
What now?
Software piracy is apparently becoming a thing of the past. Despite numerous torrent trackers still running, the trend becomes obvious when you look closely at the life in these places. Seedings have much less peers, their speed is lower, and fresh content appears much less frequently. Moreover, torrents always were a perfect place to spread malicious content – both in the package with promised software and instead of it. Leave aside that using cracked apps can create you a lot of legal problems if the fact of their usage is uncovered.
Other trackers I’ve mentioned above are still working and don’t have such serious problems as RarBG did. But who knows what happens behind the scenes? Maybe, we’ll see other piracy sites shutting down in the near future, or not – thanks to the users migration from the ceased website. Yet at this point, it is obvious that the war between piracy and licensed software is won by the latter.
