Torrent Tracker in Russia has just Taught Entire Nation how to Use VPN.
Copyright owners decided to shut down the most popular torrent tracker in Russia, but they forgot that the internet is more powerful than the government.
Rutracker is the Russian version of the Pirate Bay. It’s the largest torrent tracker in Russia and has more than one million views a day. However, recently, Russian government decided to block the access to the website after complaints from copyright owners.
It’s important to mention that the admins of the torrent site were always very open minded to block posts, when rights holders were complaining. But something has changed in the minds of the copyright companies and they decided to close down one of the most popular websites in Russia.
You can’t imagine how wrong they were doing it.
But before, let me tell you this. There is one feature that distinguishes RuTracker from many other websites on the web. It’s the audience. People who use torrent trackers in Russia (and I guess around the world) are people who have some advanced skills in computing. They know how to use VPN. So when the ban came to power yesterday — the traffic of the website didn’t fall at all. Why?
What you can see above is the number of views of RuTracker on January 25th and 26th. Take a look at the right box. It says that on 25th of January the number of users was 1,137, 576, and the box on the left shows that on the next day (the first day of blockade) the number of views have fallen for 13 per cent.
Website is blocked — views remain the same.
Generally the number of views can vary from day to day. So drop of 13 percent is not significant if you take into account the fact that the access to the website was blocked completely. For example the number of views of Alexey Navalny’s blog had significantly dropped when his blog was blocked in 2014.
Copyright holders now, are going to face much bigger problems. If before the blockade the admins of the Rutracker were removing the content at their request — now copyright holders cannot complain, because officially torrent tracker doesn’t operate in Russia anymore.
So users now can upload any content they want and other users using VPN software such as Tor can access it and download it.
I wanted to download Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises” several months ago from RuTracker. I went to the website, but the movie was removed from there. The message said “The movie has been deleted at the request of copyright holder”. So now, with the introduction of the blockade, the users will be able to upload the movie back to the website and millions will be able to download it illegally again all because of the introduced blockade. Rutracker’s admins will have no reason to remove the content, because, technically, they don’t exist in Russia anymore.
Internet is magic. It doesn’t like harsh actions from governments. It doesn’t like authority — it likes transparency. Copyright holders could continue cooperating with Rutracker and discuss a system which could filter certain illegal content. But what they did hand in hand with the government is that they rejected themselves from the legal power they had over the website.
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