There was a dark time when staying up to date with our favorite TV shows and movies wasn’t as easy as opening Netflix or HBO Max and pressing a button: piracy was an intrinsic part of every internet user’s life during the 2000s. In fact, it’s likely that you still have DVDs and CDs filled with downloaded content that you’ll never have time to watch. But all good things must come to an end, and this past week marked the final nail in the coffin of one of the most essential websites on the internet. RARBG is dead, long live RARBG.
The Audiovisual Library of Alexandria
It is easy to summarize a torrent website like RARBG in one phrase: “A site for piracy.” Yes, that’s what it was. And yes, perhaps it would have eventually suffered the blow from the industry that sank The Pirate Bay, among many others. But it was much more than that: it was the only place to find many series or movies that would never be released on DVD, let alone uploaded to any of the streaming platforms we can think of. Fifteen years of massive uploads is a long time.
You might be thinking, “Well, who cares if a hundred Hungarian movies from the 1940s are lost if they have no value to the general public?” We live in a world where the discovery of a lost silent film is an event: Do you really think it doesn’t matter to let hundreds of them vanish into thin air in the face of an industry that is not willing to give them fair treatment? RARBG also served as an encyclopedic library of lost films and series, the last bastion to find some gems that, in another world that rewards speed and novelty, would be buried under a heap of audiovisual mediocrity. In 4K, of course.
But let’s say that anything before 2010 already bores you to death and you have every possible streaming service. Well, despite all that, the news of its disappearance is a tragedy. Because if there’s one thing we’ve learned in recent years, it’s that streaming platforms are anything but reliable: when a series disappears from HBO Max or Disney+ like so many have, what happens to them? And above all, don’t their creators have the right for their work to be seen?
Series like ‘Minx,’ ‘Genera+ion,’ ‘Infinity Train,’ or ‘Westworld’ were erased from the Warner platform without any ceremony, leaving no possibility for any customer to watch them, no matter how much they pay. Even streaming services like Quibi left all their series in limbo when they shut down! We may have more or less agreement from an ethical standpoint (I have my qualms about it), but if physical formats are reduced to a minimum and streaming companies don’t even respect their own content, only RARBG, the Great Audiovisual Library of Alexandria, was the solution, a way beyond legality to correct the mistakes of big companies and, in some way, make them accountable. Over time, we will see its loss for what it is: an absolute tragedy.
