The Pirate Bay Remains Resilient, 20 Years After the Raid
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes. Usually some kind of ADR, like someone talking off camera. There's an episode where Reese rents an apartment and there's a recurring bit of him talking to his depressed neighbour through the wall. But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio, so it's just Reese having a one-sided conversation with a wall. We saw multiple episodes where something like this happened, and when I looked online there were reports of it dating back years.
Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc. No one providing official routes to this media seems to care. You have AI-upscaled "4k" movies where the actors don't even look like themselves and there are hallucinated artifacts and things that aren't there. Images cropped to widescreen, like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons. TV series with edits or entire episodes removed because they were deemed too offensive. Movies and shows randomly appearing and disappearing so you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series. Just a nightmare.
The licenses for the song tracks have also expired; so they removed these too. The main noticeable difference is being the intro sequence originally sung by There Might be Giants which has been replaced with a less-impressive cover that ruins the vibe.
Why can't these tracks just forever live with the series? I went and bought the DVD box-set just because of such. A £2 purchase that I than ripped to my NAS.
I've not watched the latest remake because I don't want to ruin the original vibe of such a great show.
Real acting, real filming; the last of it's kind.
They're talking about pieces of dialogue in the show, not licensed music.
First, licensing arrangements for "all marketing channels" only account for the channels that exist at the time. When a new market channel opens up, such as streaming, music labels will require new licensing terms for that channel. If they don't, they might not get paid. (TV & movie studios are just as ruthless as music labels).
Second, in turn, the labels often have to get new permission from artists for the new channel. Tracking down all artists can be a challenge and require resources that they can't recoup.
Edit: I lost the bet and there's no notable music involved: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pu8-dxRkoTI
Maybe that was a thing with the new reboot? I don't know because I heard nothing that made me want to watch it.
>... like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons.
My collection of The Simpsons, seasons 1-13, are all TV rips from waaaaayyyyy back in the 00's. Sure, it's not super high-quality, but at least they don't look like the ugly remasters (on some of the ones I've tried watching on Disney+, they look like someone's drawn over the old cells), the aspect ratio is the original so nothing's missing and, as a personal bonus, they've got the old Q13 logo in the bottom (I grew up in western WA). They still look great on my newer TV.
Edit: Oh, and the Michael Jackson episode never suddenly disappeared from my library.
A show like The Simpsons is both. The viewers care about the art, and we tolerate the product to get it. The creators are creating art, compromising with the corporation and broadcaster to make it enough of a product. But the corp/broadcaster only care about the product. The art is the chocolate around the advertising pill.
So when the product-minded people control preservation and resharing of the product, the art always gets compromised. Jokes are clipped. Audio is broken. Episodes are pulled. For all the wrong reasons.
I think it goes beyond latching on the dictionary definition, and really looking into how platform owners see the bits they push around. It's not about being "clever" with words to score a point, but actually about the meaning we want to give art, be it novels, drawings, music or shows/movies.
Also, "platform owners" (or advertisers, as another comment puts it) managed to install this term and so most of us use it, so it's no longer just platform owners. Which is why RMS railed against it.
To me content often implies a kind of volume of work. Always be posting. Don’t miss a few days or your viewers go elsewhere. Lots and lots of content!
The concerns of a product are the salability. Is has to fit perfectly into a 22 mins slot. It can’t upset the wrong people. It has to fit the mood and culture that our advertisers want. Etc.
In the context of advertisers, content is just what you deliver for a price (Netflix, Disney), or against which you slap advertising (Youtube). You want more of it so you can charge more, and care little what fills this content pipeline.
Alas, we would hope that it would be the best art that gets preserved but a lot of the time it is some of the most mass produced.
But some of those old rips hold up. Not great but they will do.
A few years ago I did see a rip that pushed the limits of codecs. It was, at that point, every season of Futurama before Hulu brought it back but it fit on a single layer DVD. It was squeezed just a little too much as that was something like 100ish episodes. But neat to see.
CHALMERS: Yes, and you call him John Jay Smith despite the fact that the voice is obviously Michael Jackson's.
Has the “Lisa it’s your birthday”-song.
I think the biggest thinking preventing me from pulling that trigger is the charm of the old TV station logo in the bottom of each episode that's from the same local station I grew up watching the show on. Even many of the end credits have a little side chyron pop out with the evening's programming schedule on it. It's super nostalgic for me, and it almost feels wrong to watch the show without any of that.
I still get that original melody stuck in my head because I must have watched the original dizens of times from VHS, but I've never been able to find it again.
People can say what they want about piracy, but it continues to be what I consider a necessity against culturally important media being further tainted by rent seekers looking to make another buck in any way they can.
Then Netflix came along and introduced streaming. I was happy. It began to fragment a bit, I could live with that.
Now it’s 10 different platforms with rotating content, I need a 3rd party website to know where and when to watch a particular thing, it’s a mess.
Not only that, unlike with cable they make it difficult to record the content they’re serving me so I can watch later myself.
I am now a pirate again.
I still pay for subs but never utilize them because piracy is a superior experience.
I totally get it. I'm a thief as well. But I guess the difference is, I don't need to rationalize everything into some sort of twisted sense justice. I steal because I don't care what the creator thinks.
Down to the arguments being made why this is “theft”. I also can’t believe that the arguments by the general pop have shifted to support multi billion dollar companies and their narrative.
A loss of a sale, is still a loss of a sale. It's vastly different to /not/ selling something.
I guess in your mind hitler isn’t a mass murderer because what he was doing was technically legal under his regime. To each their own if that’s how you want to logically frame your moral logic.
Personally imo, if I create something and that something is MY work of art and what I put my own blood sweat and tears into, and I want it to be inconvenient to watch because that’s my prerogative, that doesn’t give you the fucking right to watch it. I don’t want someone like you watching it.
None of this is new. None of your ideas are unique. Stop attempting to draw moral equivalency to theft or anything else.
Back in the glory days of piracy, profits from entertainment kept going up? You know why? Those pirates were almost certainly not going to pay in the first place. No one lost money. It was university students, high schoolers, plain old poor people that were pirating.
Making it hard to watch your movie didn’t raise revenue, we all just did something else. Because we had no money.
Flaws in logic and the darknesses of both become readily apparent because the paradoxes are exposed at the extremes.
Claiming you have 4k resolution when you upscale (damn, those DS9 episodes looked really terrible on Netflix) and claiming sound quality when you have none, is still theft.
This sounds pretty unlikely. It's more likely that there's an issue with your surround system, and that audio "should" be coming from your rear speakers but for some reason it's not.
Also just Google "malcolm in the middle missing audio" and you'll find a ton of people with the issue
https://www.reddit.com/r/malcolminthemiddle/comments/1kggg7d...
This also reminded me of another issue - the show was filmed to be broadcast in 4:3 but apparently someone along the line decided 16:9 is inherently better, so they put out the show in widescreen and now there's a ton of shots where you can see things you're not supposed to see. Someone else standing in for an actor that wasn't there when they filmed, or a toy doll in place of a real baby because they filmed on a day the baby actor wasn't there.
Also worth noting that we switched the audio track to Spanish and you can hear it just fine.
1. buy movie on iTunes 2. have kids that can't do long distance drives 3. obtain dvd players for car 4. realized I can't play films that I "bought" on DVD players
It feels like the "Buy" button on iTunes/Apple TV is misleading, and should be renamed to "License to watch on Apple devices". Obvious in hindsight, but this type of DRM severely restricts use cases.
Of course buying a movie on itunes means you can only watch it on capable devices. You can't play a youtube video on a VHS player either.
Also, IIRC, there was a period where you could burn Audio CDs from music that you purchased on iTunes.
edit: turns out music purchased on iTunes is DRM-free!
Music purchased on iTunes is DRM-free, so you can definitely burn CDs with them.
Why?
Why can’t I get the file and put it on another device? Why can’t I burn it to a dvd? It makes sense that Apple aren’t required to make more software for random devices, but why can’t I have the file and do what I want with it?
Luckily the torrent sites are available from every country.
As in, I had a physical CD I had purchased, ripped to MP3, and loaded onto my iPhone.
iTunes recognised it, linked it to the matching official entry in their music store, they lost the licence and deleted all customer copies including mine.
But apparently it still syncs itself on some devices to this day
That the license kind of sucks and comes with restrictions is the bigger problem than any inherent deception
When I purchase stuff, I don't wanna read a legal contract. No one wants, no one does.
The contrariam in me thinks: If the contract is that crucial, let's have a mandatory, non skippable, slow scrolling of it, or maybe audio version slowly read.
I bet all TOS would get much simpler and tame!
Stallman would never use an MP3 as it used to be a proprietary format.
That actually sounds very much like what you are supposed to do with a owned digital asset.
User error but blaming the service to make an ideological point.
The dialog is just fine if you have a surround sound system or spend 5 seconds once to select stereo sound. Importantly, the dialog is still missing in the torrent versions taken from the surround sound stream because the same problem occurs. You only get the missing dialog in stereo if you download the stereo rip.
A streaming service incorrectly defaulting to surround sound is most certainly not a user error.
Disney+ defaults to the sound settings passed to it by the user's TV or device. It doesn't default to surround sound unless the user sets their TV or Roku or other device to surround sound.
And either way...it's the programmers at fault here. Very hypocritical for tech bros to pirate someone else's content when it's their own brethren that created the problem they're using to justify their piracy.
In some Netflix shows, they say words in the english audio that are translated in French with different words with a similar meaning, and with english close-caption words that are also different from the original english audio.
Quite amazing.
So torrents it is, its legal here, lightning speed, always superb quality (one can choose any movie in range between 1GB and 50 GB for 1080p and all is very good looking), get it in a minute, and watch.
I don't blame Netflix generally (well for those german subs I definitely do, I know they have english ones just couldn't be bothered and I have hard time believing they have region issue with english subs) but license owners, they are the ultimate fuckers messing with content holders/resellers/renters, and consequently us users.
Also, torrents are so convenient, I won't be paying some service just to see a single show a year. I just won't even for a month and shuffle things like idiot, thats a bad proposition.
After the initial Netflix release of the first 3.5 seasons (might have been 4.5, it was a baffling cutoff) they somehow decided not to add the rest, so I pirated it. Every single pirated intro came with perfectly correct lyrics.
I watched an English language TV show, that had a load of German in it. And I got subs for all the English, nothing from the German, then I switched to another source, then it had the inverse, which was great. But what if I wanted subs for the whole thing?
I think one even had the German words, in German....
Which is great if you are learning the language but not yet proficient enough to understand fast speech.
A friend once pointed that out. He pays a lot and gets low quality. That was what changed his mind. That was also almost twenty years ago.
Most people changed. US corporations trying to raid people in foreign countries is, in my opinion, no longer acceptable at all. The swedish government should be ashamed for acting as US proxies here (nowadays with Trump this is more clear, but even 20 years ago or 25 years ago, it should have been a no-brainer).
Obligatory classic joke:
Have you seen the new show? It's on Tubu. It's literally on Heebee. It's on Poodee with ads. It's literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on Weeno. Dude it's on Gumpy. It's a Pheebo original. It's on Poob. You can watch it on Poob. You can go to Poob and watch it. Log onto Poob right now. Go to Poob. Dive into Poob. You can Poob it. It's on Poob. Poob has it for you. Poob has it for you.
I am happy to speak with my wallet and tell the services to get lost and I'd be heading back to TPB if I were still in a phase of my life where discussing the latest Battlestar Galactica, Lost or Game of Thrones was a central focus of my socialization - as it is though, the cost to follow the Intended Method™ is simply too expensive in money, discovery time, and platform bugs for me to give a damn.
Maybe they'll learn their lesson again and sanity will reign - but the current media pricing is too expensive (in a myriad of ways) for the value it's providing.
I'd argue that media is substantially better value today, than it ever was back in the day.
You pay now the price of a single DVD, for a whole extensive catalogue of content. Or what you'd pay to watch a PPV for the time it was broadcast.
You pay that amount for access to said catalogue of content for a single month. If you bought the DVD, it would work for years/decades to come (assuming no manufacturing defects) plus you'd be well within your rights to make a digital copy of that DVD for your private collection.
Sure, you probably only watched that DVD 1-3 times, but that's not the point. The point is you bought it and that gives you certain rights that are now totally absent from a digital first media consumption reference point.
The thing with free is you will tend to be less demanding & most certainly more forgiving even if not less resentful.
One reason why finding market fit for products built for free consumers is harder than for paid. The ones paying you will want their problems solved pronto, and if you're diligent enough, you'll end up building a product that solves those same "hair on the fire" problems for many others with hopefully deeper pockets.
Puzzling comment overall, will refrain from usual tropes and assume in good faith its 'lost in translation'.
As counterproductive as putting prices up feels, charging $20 for VEED brought in a different and more serious type of user, they need the product and they are happy to pay for it and have different needs to the $5 users we originally had. Things started looking up for the first time in ages.
I have always prefered downloading
Torrent meets my needs better than official methods.
I don't feel guilty about it because I still paid. Now, if only, I could have a better way to filter out the garbage from the gold.
Personally for me the worst case of this is Scrubs. The soundtrack of the show is so incredibly crucial to its atmosphere. There's a scene with the Coral's Dreaming of You that they've replaced with some awful generic track in the streaming versions. That people see the show now and maybe don't even know it is just a crime.
Many of the episodes on their dubbed versions were just awful or de-synced. It can continue like that for 3-4 episodes then suddenly fix itself.
Then when I watch in Japanese with subtitles, the subtitles can occasionally be missing on some scenes.
There is plenty of money to be made in secondary sources -- merchandising and so on. They can give up trying to lock down information that naturally wants to be free. But they won't, because greed.
The whole "scene" is full of shitty re-encodes of video, with the audio or video spliced from another source. There's a whole cottage industry of squeezing content into smaller sizes.
My main problem, even with the better encoders, is the lack of choice in audio tracks and subs when I'm pretty sure the source material had the ones I might want.
And I made myself believe that I'm doing it THE RIGHT WAY hence they will do good by me.
- price hikes - shows moved between services or different seasons available on different services - some movies are just NOWHERE - sometimes there was no English language (YouTube movies in the none English speaking region like Germany - happened a lot)
So many times we would end up on a treasure hunt through the services to watch what we wanted, only to then end up just watching some Netflix vanilla stuff as we just give up.
I am all for doing the right thing, but my god, my, customer needs, are not on any priority lists.
This isn't just swapping like-for-like with stock music, it's a pervasive form of Stalinist Revisionism - with certains edits and scenes altered or completely removed when they relied on the track in question.
As a fastcompany article notes, "...streaming is also changing the way music works in new titles, with easier, safer, cheaper song choices being added to TV shows in lieu of anything interesting." The logical end-game being the relegation of musical backing in TV to AI generated muzak and genre 'sound-a-likes', like we've already seen in the lowest echelons of the advertisement and backing-track industry.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91109690/why-streaming-platforms...
On the other hand Microsoft is very much leading with OpenAI in vacuuming any content, stripping effectively copyright claims.
That being said, nowadays the only use case for me to use Pirate Bay is when I cannot get a movie elsewhere. I'd pay for it but it's not possible - because of copyright...
It's not particularly strange; the rationale for organizations like Microsoft and OpenAI is to be immune to any and all rules that could possibly foreseeably impact shareholder value. If you're not paying for their wares, you're impacting shareholder value. If you're asking them to actually license out content that they're training an AI on, you're impacting shareholder value.
Rules for thee, not for me, especially when it makes me - the special person who charitably graces society with my presence - a rich person.
Even the music industry (of all of them!) mostly gave up.
Only Hollywood and the wider film/TV industry is so stubborn.
I would never underestimate the lengths people are willing to go to to 'crack' games. Countless online-only games have been cracked with users reverse engineering the network protocol and writing their own servers. LLMs will probably greatly ease that process as well.
this era is well and truly over. you've got pre-release hypervisor bypasses and then a conventional crack a couple weeks later.
edit: i might've misinterpreted your comment, i expect some older denovo titles might never get the modern treatment
Can this be manipulated to frame arbitrary users for piracy?
The solution is: make purchasing legitimate copies an easier and better experience than piracy. That's it. That's all you need to do. There will, of course, always be piracy by those who can't afford to purchase the software or have other ideological goals, but for the vast majority of users, making it easy and pleasant to fork over cash for goods is how you stop them from stealing.
Meanwhile music, movies, and TV have decided to sprint in the exact opposite direction. It's now so onerous and expensive to even find let alone watch something that normal users are flocking to piracy. Not because it's cheaper, but because the experience is better in every conceivable way. To most people, the fact that you now own a real copy forever is merely a bonus. The real killer feature is that if you want to watch something it is always available. You can search for anything and get a result. Torrents don't usually go away on a rotating weekly basis. If you want something, it's available, and nobody gets in your way (if you do it right).
They didn't.
Although the raid and the subsequent criminal investigation were
carried out in Sweden, the US Government played a major role behind
the scenes.
(2012) Chris Dodd [MPAA chief] went on Fox News to explicitly threaten
politicians who accept MPAA campaign donations that they’d better
pass Hollywood’s favorite legislation… or else:
https://www.techdirt.com/2012/01/20/mpaa-directly-publicly-t...
no trackers, but the hash is enough to find seeds on dht
everything pre-2023 just works
2. Usenet is still alive and thriving for this.
3. Libraries still exist and you can rent and rip media there
4.Internet Archive is a great resource for old stuff
5. Just buy physical copies and rip em. Can check eBay etc.
I used to do this kind of things decades ago, but there was also still a few things not ripped and uploaded you had _some_ chance of participating.
Nowadays I imagine ~everything under the sun is already ripped, so how can you contribute to seed ratio? (or is that not even a thing anymore?)
hey there's a project idea: a "todo list" for rippers that scrapes imdb and checks what's not in pirate bay (and then looks for dvd's on ebay / libraries)
For really obscure content, internet archive, your library, usenet or even eBay are the go to!
It's not E2EE IIRC, though, so use with caution.
> hey there's a project idea: a "todo list" for rippers that scrapes imdb and checks what's not in pirate ba
Private sites do things like this, archival efforts and have request systems.
Personally I do not feel guilty pirating a decades old TV show or movie. And I really doubt the industry cares much either.
If you’re in Reddit, there’s also a subreddit dedicated specifically to this kind of thing (requests for stuff that is no longer available) called /r/DHExchange
A lot of mainstream stuff is ripped already, the “ratio” on some is more if you download a torrent, they want you to seed it for x amount of time or seed it back x amount to the community. I don’t know of any that expect you to be ripping and uploading that way, it’s recommended but a lot have groups for mainstream content.
There are a few “elitist” private trackers that require “interviews” and stuff, but don’t let that scare you off 99% of them are all just grab and invite or sign up and seed back to community for the week or so minimum (preferably longer) and your good to go!
But good luck to see a live seed. I have a torrent from ~2010 which is stuck at 2%, so some seed did come online some years ago I was able to leech those meager bits from them - but not ever since.
Same for my own torrent on TPB from 2008, i tried to dload it in 2015 and wasn't sucessful in it despite it was 1st one for some years for that particular title.
Try other protocols/services (listed in other comments in the thread) or maybe offer a bounty if it's something you can't buy.
I've got three open right now for ebooks which I don't think will ever finish. (one is 3.5TB)
We (the users) have to concern ourselves with how big the file is. And TPB tends to surface the most popular stuff first.
Usually a 1080p re-encode is good enough quality for me. And a lot of the time if I'm looking for a movie to watch right away I'd rather just get it fast so I can start watching.
I torrent TPB because it's what people know. I don't care for private trackers, I just want to support the common torrenters.
Its not hard to decide what to prefer. Even with 1GB/s optic fiber I just couldn't be bothered to download 20-40x larger files and then struggle to see any difference in 4k on 75" screen.
And lets be honest - apart from poor folks with OCD or similar trait, after 1 minute of watching I couldn't care less about audiovisual quality, heck I enjoy even 720p rip if its the only thing available.
It’s funny to hear someone say that hard drive sizes are too small, and internet connections too slow, when RuTracker (a tracker whose core audience is former USSR, often shitty provincial cities) has a very lively culture of remuxes.
edit: I'm very sorry for making a relevant comment that extrapolate on the content of the shared article.
Meanwhile a huge portion of them are filmed in other countries, edited by brits, staring europeans, etc.
There's a good reason major studios have spent billions on film studios in the UK instead of the US.
Take something like Andor. Filmed in the UK and Spain, with a team of staff almost exclusively from the UK and EU. With a Mexican lead actor, 1 American co-lead, and then tons of British Actors, a few Australians, Swedish, German, Irish, etc.
Very few big movies or tv shows can be classed as "American" these days. They require people and facilities from all over the place.
In reality they're just off-shoring costs, but it's still "American".
- Normal User, no special status (No Skull) - Trusted (Pink Skull) - VIP (Green Skull) - Helper (Blue Skull, Legacy) - Moderator (Black MOD Tag) - Super Moderator (Red MOD Tag) - Administrator (Black ADMIN Tag)
https://pirates-forum.org/Thread-ThePirateBay-Want-Trusted-V...
Not to mention you can just open the download page from within qBittorrent.
i.postimg.cc/tJ2tMJYm/pb-example.jpg
Do you see any ads there?
You mean you don't use Firefox? Then that's on you bro!!
But even for those I recommend the popup blocker strict extension.
Nothing beats yts for shitty compression
For games/programs, I'll mostly just check the download page to ensure it's from a verified, trustworthy group.
Mostly though, I've never felt the need to be as paranoid as some people suggest one must be when torrenting; despite doing this for 20+ years, I've not had any incidents since I was about 12 years old.
I might be misremembering something, so ask again if something I said didn't work or wasn't where I said.
Free extra tip: did you know qBittorrent has support for themes? I got a pretty clean dark theme one, but no way I can remember the name or where I found it.
I love qBittorrent.
So the real pirates was the swedish government. It's time to completely change the whole government. Back in 2006 they thought they targeted only few individuals. I am sure there are many more people who don't support what the swedish government did. Did they ever apologize for serving US corporations here? How much financial kickback did they get there?
But I want to start a new bittorrent tracker for individual movies or episodes for which the provider requires you to create a recurring subscription, to rip off such content unabashedly.
By the way, Stremio is not at all torrent or p2p software. It's just a streaming software and you can plug in any streaming source/add-on for this, including torrents, of course just to watch legally available videos.
Maybe check it out: https://github.com/stremio https://www.stremio.com
> TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse.
> As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up. At least then you can quit while you’re on top. I think I left TPB just a little bit after that top, and not when it’s as shitty as it was when it was closed today. It feels good that it might have closed down forever, just a real shame the way it did that. A planned retirement would have given the community time and a way to kick off something new, something better, something faster, something more reliable and with no chance of corrupting itself. Something that had a soul and could retain it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160712155638/http://blog.broke...
For anyone who doesn't know, the KLF took a million pounds in cash, and set it on fire. For no obvious reason.
KLF burned down a million pounds. Has anyone else in history done anything like this? Even if so, KLF’s in rarefied company because it’s not something that happens even remotely close to regularly.
And the amount of anger I see in people when discussing what KLF did with their own money means the art was significant enough to generate strong opinions.
Entire generations of people have no idea something exists
Google had been asked to remove Pirate Bay in results. They didn't. On Google, and I don't really know how it changed over the years, but there'd be a notice about links removed due to DMCA, if it came to that, basically. (Okay, Youtube, which they own, has always been a bit aggressive, and that isn't nothing)
Facebook? Facebook wouldn't let you SEND a link to PB in private messages. It still deletes your post now if you link Anna's Archive. This after apparently heavily scraping LibGen
I don't love Google for a lot of reasons but I damn well feel better using it compared to Mr. "Dumb Fucks"
I wonder if they ever paid the fine. Probably they will be in debt forever.
I feel for the kids that are waking up to this enshitification, without a clue on how to sail.
Most of the problems many of you are complaining about with streamers are the result of your fellow programmers doing poor work. Consider the irony that many in this discussion won't pay for Disney+ because of the technical issues on the software side of things.
Are our institutions this incapable?
I'm vaguely aware that other people than the original group are running it now.
Also, I don't torrent much, but it seems pretty stagnant and dead. It's been occasionally useful to me to find older stuff that doesn't seem to be well represented on newer (public) sites.
Example of said sites?
Not a single Utaban episode is there, even though there's many on youtube.