Private torrent trackers: closed piracy communities with strict rules
A feature by tech site The Verge shows that private BitTorrent trackers, closed communities for sharing files, are still running. Members chase ratings and often store and share content they will never use themselves.
Technology site The Verge has published a feature on private torrent trackers, closed piracy communities where files are shared using the BitTorrent protocol. Although illegal file sharing as a whole has declined in the age of streaming services, such trackers are still active, with very large and carefully organized catalogs.
How they work
Private trackers are closed: people mostly hear about them by word of mouth, and registration is often possible only with an invitation or after vetting. In some cases applicants must prove good standing on other trackers, show screenshots of their media collections or pass an interview. Some trackers specialize in narrow topics, such as Chinese movies, motorsports or Frank Zappa music.
Members must follow strict rules. They usually have to keep a certain ratio between uploaded and downloaded data, and many sites expect them to give back as much as they take. Those who break the rules can have downloads restricted or be banned immediately. Selling invites is treated as a serious violation.
Users' experience
A Canadian writer who goes by the pseudonym Jane used trackers to hunt for a rare 1990s documentary about the Library of Congress. She found it for sale and uploaded it. A student known as Odel estimates he has downloaded about 500 terabytes from roughly 30 trackers, yet watched less than one percent. Jane seeds more than 2,000 torrents, and Maysay around 3,000.
Scale
A dashboard maintained by a tracker software developer currently lists around 530 private trackers. One music tracker is said to host 3.7 million torrents, while a popular movie tracker has over 1 million torrents shared among only 40,000 registered users. The first private trackers appeared soon after BitTorrent was created 25 years ago, when the entertainment industry was taking file-sharing networks to court.
