We all knew this was going to happen at some point; even the people in charge of the website knew this was going to happen. Piratey torrent websites like rarbg just don't last in the corporate feudal state. It's not the first torrent database to go away and it won't be the last, either.
The corporate cops operate under a false assumption: that they can stop piracy in a fell swoop by taking down websites. That's like mowing the lawn and thinking the grass won't grow back. The content is still there, it's just been scattered a bit across various different websites. All rarbg did was concatenate all the various torrents into a single database in order to make it easier for people to access things on a whim; it was nothing more than a torrent seeder. The torrents themselves still exist on all the various other seeders, as well as the base content that exists in some pirate datahoard in some far-flung corner of the world that the corporate cops can never reach, no matter how hard they try. Even if they manage to find one pirate, there's always 10 more. Corporate feudalism works fast, but piracy works faster, and that's why I'm not concerned.
Remember The Pirate Bay? The original torrent database? It went down after a while, its main website became a honeypot to catch potential pirates, and then the FBI left it in the dust to track down some other perceived malefactor (Kim Dotcom). That's a parenthetical, but it's a good one. Megaupload was the new Pirate Bay, then some other places I don't know about, and then rarbg. It's just another in a long line of websites that get taken down with no discernable effect to piracy as a whole. Another website will take its place soon, but the inconvenient bit is that it'll have to be hunted down. That's really the only problem in a takedown like this; "where's the next website? What do I change my bookmark to?" The usual people who keep track of that sort of thing, who keep rotating their VPNs so they can't be tracked, they'll know where to go in probably less than a week. The loss of this one website is a mild inconvenience, nothing more.
In other words, don't buy into the clickbait. The corporate cops don't know where all the pirates are, they don't even know where one pirate is; they just know where there's a seed for her torrent. What? Pirates can be girls, too.
--1 June 2023--