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The shutdown of the main RARBG torrent site in May shocked the entire pirate ecosystem. As part of an effort to preserve access to content, archivists began uploading databases of RARBG magnet links to platforms, including GitHub. A repository forked 900 times, but a single DMCA notice submitted by a single rights holder removed every last one from GitHub. His identity is a secret.
The most reliable things in life tend to be the ones most easily taken for granted. In the piracy ecosystem, that certainly applies to the RARBG torrent site.
RARBG was never likely to win any awards for being the best looking site with state of the art features. Their operators wouldn't expect to earn any either. What the site did was what any indexer of any content should strive to achieve; Lots of well-organized, easy-to-search content, all backed by supporting sources of complementary data, with very little downtime and zero drama.
to the site threw the towel In May, RARBG met all of these requirements and made it look easy. The decision to close obviously came as a shock, but the complete lack of notice took everyone by surprise. There would be no closing event, and no last days to take what people had taken for granted would always be available.
Backups are boring
As computing tasks go, backups are pretty boring. The same cannot be said of not having a backup when you really need it. A split second decision to endorse The Pirate Bay in 2006 saved the site and thanks to the quiet work of archivists over several years, RARBG's massive database of magnet links did not die along with the site.
After RARBG was shut down, databases of magnet links appeared on forums, file hosting sites, even packaged as torrents. An early load of more than 270,000 links it appeared on GitHub and then took on a life of its own as contributors added to the database and created their own forks.
A later readme suggests that the archive contained over six million magnet links, possibly one of the largest collections ever seen.
But just as RARBG failed to report them missing, these backups also abruptly disappeared this week, removed by GitHub in response to a copyright complaint.
Entire repositories declared infringing
Given the sheer volume of magnet links in the original repository, the chances of receiving a DMCA takedown notice from one or more rights holders out of a pool of thousands were always relatively high. A conventional rights holder in the film or music industry would have been a relatively safe prediction, but would have been off the mark in this case.
โThis letter is a Notice of Infringement as authorized under 512(c) of the US Copyright Law,โ the DMCA notice reads.
โI am the copyright owner of the works and the following is true and accurate. I own all rights to these videos. I also have 2257, IDs and model releases for them. I also have documents signed by the original producers that certify that I am the ownerโ.
Unusually, the DMCA notice posted by GitHub does not list any original work. Presumably, they were present in the original advisory, and for some reason GitHub made the decision to redact it. What we can deduce from the above is that the mention of '2257' is a reference to 18 USC ยงยง 2257 and the legal requirement to maintain name and age verification records related to adult film performers.
The DMCA notice initially lists four repositories (1,2,3,4) along with a request to remove them entirely.
โAll of these repositories are infringing as they share multiple links to content that I own the copyright to. They also share and provide ways to facilitate piracy of such content. [sic]โ, adds the notice.
GitHub removed them, but the end result was much more complete.
There are more than 900!
In addition to the first four named repos, the complaint called for the removal of the forks. Lots and lots of forks.
A GitHub memo states that because the reported network containing the allegedly infringing content had more than 100 repositories, and the submitter claimed that the forks were "infringing to the same extent" as the parent repository, the notice applied against all network.
What started as the takedown of a network of 45 repositories ended up as a comprehensive takedown of 900 repositories, including the main repository.
DMCA Notice Sender Identity: Unknown
In the interest of privacy, GitHub rightly removes personal information from DMCA notices, but rarely completely removes all information that would allow the sender to be identified. In this case, all the information has been redacted.
We can only speculate why GitHub made this decision, but one option is for the submitter to represent in a personal capacity (rather than a corporate entity). They may have a vested interest in the content beyond simply owning it, but those are the kinds of details the copywriting is designed to cover up.
The final question relates to magnet links and the allegedly infringing content claimed to be connected to them. RARBG has been offline for over a month, long enough that no seeds or pairs remain in any number of swarms.
So, on the one hand, the magnet links referenced in the notice could be considered as enablers of the infringement, if they still work. On the other hand, if the swarm is already dead, those magnets are just strings of text and are useless to anyone. If someone has a backup of the backup, more than six million magnets need to be checked, just to be sure.
The DMCA takedown notice can be found here
