Torrent underground

When Jane first heard about Memory and Imagination, a rare 1990s documentary about the Library of Congress, she was intrigued. But the Canadian writer in her 30s couldn’t find the movie anywhere — not on streaming services, not on YouTube, not on pirate sites — and her intrigue turned into obsession.

Torrent underground

by Janko Roettgers

Worried it might become a lost film, Jane decided to scour auction sites, search every library catalog she could think of, and even enlist some of her online acquaintances to find a copy. Her plan was to “share it with other people to help ensure it would be preserved into the future,” as she puts it. Jane knew the perfect tool for the task: a private torrent tracker.

“I am ethically conflicted about piracy. I often feel guilty about it.”

Private trackers are essentially the speakeasies of the online piracy world. Promoted primarily by word of mouth, they rely on secrecy, exclusivity, and strict community rules to shield everything that’s going on behind closed doors from the public’s prying eyes. What unites these communities is that they all use BitTorrent to trade media among like-minded file sharers. But their focuses range widely, from general-purpose trackers with catalogs so broad that they make Netflix look like a niche service to the many specialized communities for categories like Chinese movies, motorsports, visual effects tools, e-learning courses, and Japanese porn. There’s even a private tracker just for Frank Zappa music.

Private trackers are known for massive and meticulously organized catalogs, which they owe to users like Jane, who, like every other pirate I talked to for this story, opted to be identified by a pseudonym due to the terabytes of copyrighted data they’ve been sharing. These are people willing to go the extra mile to find long-forgotten movies, rare concert recordings, or out-of-print books. “Many private tracker users are fully consumed with archive fever,” she says.

At first, Jane had no luck finding a physical copy of that elusive documentary, which includes interviews with Steve Jobs and Julia Child. Nobody was selling it on eBay. Her local public library didn’t have it. Neither did any other public library in North America. And when she finally located a DVD that was available to the public, it was in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina — Egypt’s modern-day re-creation of the ancient library that’s long been synonymous with lost media. “That bowled me over,” Jane says. “This obscure movie I’m looking for is only available in the Library of Alexandria!”

Eventually, Jane found Memory and Imagination for sale on a small online marketplace for historical media. Jane instantly bought a copy and uploaded it. “It looked like a digital rip of a severely degraded VHS tape,” she says. “I was still over the moon [that] I rescued this historically significant documentary.”

Not everyone who uses private trackers shares Jane’s amateur-archivist zeal. Some are simply in it for easy access to pirated movies, TV shows, or other forms of entertainment. “My goal initially was to have a better source for video games,” says Odel, a West Coast-based college student. “I quickly found out that [private trackers] could replace everything else.” Others join trackers in search of a community of like-minded cinephiles or music fans. And as they immerse themselves in a world of illicit media trading that’s largely shielded from public view, many of them seem to catch a peculiar kind of bug.

“There aren’t many closed doors on the internet.”

They painstakingly work their way up the ranks in the trackers they’ve joined and then use their freshly earned social capital to get access to even more exclusive sites, where the same rat race starts all over again. “Exclusivity definitely plays a part,” says Maysay, a private tracker user from Pakistan. “You want to get into those more exclusive ‘elite’ trackers at some point just for the sake of it.”

“There is definitely a constant quest to level up,” says Jane, who maintains active accounts on 14 private trackers.

Among the people I talked to for this story, that’s actually a small number. Some private tracker users maintain dozens of accounts, download terabytes of data, share thousands of torrents at a time, embark on obsessive quests to get their hands on long-lost media, and use automated apps and tools that make everyday piracy seem like child’s play.

In a world where streaming services offer access to countless movies and TV shows for little more than your credit card number, private trackers can seem a bit like a throwback. A nod to a different time, when legal options didn’t really exist and file sharing happened in private chat rooms or on password-protected FTP servers.

“There aren’t many closed doors on the internet,” says Jane, who became interested in joining private trackers after hearing about them from friends. Jane quickly realized that she couldn’t just sign up for the latest and greatest movie trackers, which were only open to vetted users with a history of good behavior on other servers. So she devised a plan to join a more lenient private tracker for audiobooks first and work her way up from there.

Users who fall below certain metrics often find their download privileges curtailed, and especially egregious offenses result in instant bans.

Even getting access to that first server came with some hurdles. Private tracker websites rarely have freely accessible sign-up forms. Some only open their doors to new users every few weeks or months, while others use special vetting processes to make sure applicants are a good fit. Sometimes this means that applicants are required to prove they’re in good standing on other trackers. Sometimes they need to take screenshots of their personal media collections to show they’re actually interested in what the tracker they’re applying to is all about. And sometimes there are even actual interviews applicants have to ace before getting their accounts.

The long-defunct private music tracker What.CD used to quiz applicants about audio formats and MP3 encoder settings, and even published a study guide of sorts to help them prepare for it. And Jane’s very first private tracker required her to first join an IRC chatroom, where admins quizzed her about the server’s rules. “It was so stressful! It felt like a job interview,” she says.

Not every private tracker has these kinds of interviews, but like Jane’s first server, most are big on rules. Users are generally required to keep up a certain upload-to-download ratio, with many sites demanding that they contribute as much bandwidth as they consume. (The exact rules and requirements vary, and many trackers also offer some “freeleech” content — files that can be downloaded without negatively impacting a user’s ratio.) Quickly downloading a file without sharing it is also frowned upon, as is the unvetted distribution of invites to outsiders.

Users who fall below certain metrics often find their download privileges curtailed, and especially egregious offenses result in instant bans. “Invite selling is considered to be a major breach of security,” says Odel. Doing so will not only get you kicked from a server, it will also tarnish your reputation elsewhere. “Staff of the tracker you did it on will typically communicate with the staff of some other trackers, which can result in you getting banned from those places as well,” Odel explains.

If you do follow the rules and share generously, you have a chance to work your way up the ranks, which then opens the doors to other trackers. That alone, and the requirement to keep up a healthy upload-to-download ratio, can lead to people downloading and then redistributing (also known as “seeding” in tracker lingo) files just to maintain their stats. “Some places will require you to seed [a certain amount of] terabytes before you get access to a certain rank,” says Odel. “This can result in a lot of downloading of stuff I wouldn’t ever consume otherwise, just to pump up that number.”

“You have to seed things you aren’t interested in consuming to succeed in the tracker economy.”

Odel estimates that he has downloaded around 500 terabytes of data from the 30 or so private trackers he’s currently active on. In the end, he’s watched very little of it. “Probably less than one percent,” he says.

That discrepancy is not uncommon. “I am seeding over 2,000 torrents, and I have no personal interest in almost any of them,” admits Jane. Maysay tells me that he seeds around 3,000 torrents at any given time and has downloaded things he doesn’t intend to watch “many times.”

“It’s how these sites are built,” Jane explains. “You have to seed things you aren’t interested in consuming to succeed in the tracker economy.” Some private tracker users use automated tools to help them maintain their ratio, like scripts that watch dedicated IRC channels to quickly jump on any newly released torrent, no matter what content it is. This is called “racing” in tracker lingo, and it can help improve one’s ratio; anyone looking to download that file later will get it from those early downloaders. Especially committed users even rent a dedicated seedbox — a private server sitting in some remote data center that is only used for downloading and then seeding torrents.

Being able to download more is only one reason for trying to improve your ratio and standing on private trackers. “I just do it for fun,” Jane says. “It’s kind of like playing a video game and watching your score go up.” And just like with some video games, there is a certain addictive quality to all this. ”Using private trackers reminded me a lot of playing MMORPG games like World of Warcraft or RuneScape where you really have to grind to level up,” Jane says. “It’s slow, tedious, and repetitive. Yet you feel this insatiable compulsion to level up.”

Private BitTorrent trackers emerged soon after BitTorrent itself was created 25 years ago. This was at the height of the file-sharing wars, when Hollywood and the major record labels were taking one peer-to-peer network operator after another to court. Entertainment industry lawsuits resulted in the shutdown of Napster in 2001, Audiogalaxy in 2002, and Kazaa in 2006.

Those closures drove millions of file sharers to embrace BitTorrent, which in turn put torrent sites into the crosshairs of rightsholders and their lawyers. Suprnova, a public torrent site frequented by millions of users, shut down amid legal pressure at the end of 2004. And in 2006, authorities raided The Pirate Bay.

Some torrent site admins responded to the increasing legal pressure by simply pulling up a drawbridge to their piracy communities. Instead of letting just anyone download torrents, they required users to register, and in some cases only admitted new users that had gotten an invite from a trusted community member.

Nobody knows exactly how many private trackers are currently up and running, or how many people use them for their pirated media fix. But while BitTorrent piracy as a whole has declined since the emergence of Netflix, Spotify, and other paid streaming services, private trackers are still going strong.

A live dashboard maintained by a tracker software developer currently lists around 530 private trackers, including some with hundreds of thousands of registered users. One music tracker, listed only as [REDACTED] on this dashboard, is said to host 3.7 million torrents, or works to download. A popular movie tracker included in the list has more than 1 million torrents, which are being traded among just 40,000 registered users.

“Occasionally people will request or ask for something that just isn’t available commercially anymore, or ever, and attach a huge bounty to it.”

One of the first notable private trackers was Oink’s Pink Palace, an invite-only music sharing community with a reported 180,000 registered users. Among them was Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor, who told Vulture in 2007 that the site had been “like the world’s greatest record store,” offering access to “pretty much anything you could ever imagine [...] in the format you wanted.”

Many private tracker communities meticulously curate catalogs that put publicly accessible piracy sites to shame. “The private tracker experience is a lot better,” says Marvin, a 23-year-old software developer from the Pacific Northwest. Public torrent sites are often ad-ridden and hard to navigate and search, he says. Maysay agrees, telling me that he appreciates private trackers “not just because of the amount of content [available], but also because of the quality, organization, and how well everything is sorted.”

The curation happening in these private communities is very much a group effort. Many private trackers offer their members a chance to request files they want others to upload, complete with bounties (download credits that you would otherwise have to upload other files for) for the first uploader. The rarer the file, the bigger the bounty. And the bigger the bounty, the more frenzied the hunt for that elusive file.

”Are large corporations to be trusted with archiving our culture?”

One famous quest for such a bounty unfolded in 2013, when a user of the since-shuttered What.CD server put out a request for “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” a story from Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger that the writer himself had refused to publish. For a long time, the only known copy of “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” resided in Princeton University’s Firestone Library, where visitors could read but not copy the document.

The intrigue — Salinger didn’t publish a single work for the last 45 years of his life — combined with the fact that there clearly was at least one copy out there set off a frenzy among What.CD users, with the bounty reportedly swelling to a massive 6TB. Some came up with schemes to memorize every word of the story while visiting Princeton’s library, while others scoured the Earth for other copies.

A few months later, a What.CD user was ready to claim the bounty. “It took me many weeks of research to find that this book existed and many more weeks to acquire it,” the user wrote in a note accompanying a torrent featuring a total of three unpublished Salinger stories, including “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls.” Someone had apparently published the three stories as part of a book that was printed just 25 times in 1999. Years later, one of those 25 copies showed up on eBay, where the What.CD uploader quickly snagged it.

The story of this unlikely act of renegade archiving quickly made headlines worldwide, and to this day is legendary in the private tracker community. (The uploader of the book was ironically never able to claim their massive bounty, as site admins removed the torrent once it got too much outside attention.) But while few other bounty hunts have gotten that much attention, they do happen.

“A great deal of media released today will persist via private servers, much like how a lot of silent films we have today were found as reels stored in people’s attics.”

“Occasionally people will request or ask for something that just isn’t available commercially anymore, or ever, and attach a huge bounty to it,” says Odel. “People will research any potential leads, reach out to random French directors via email, and ultimately come back with nothing. Then, a few years later, somebody will randomly upload whatever was being looked for onto YouTube, with no further explanation.”

Odel told me he doesn’t personally partake in these kinds of media hunts. “But I’ve seen some things which I’d classify as ‘important’ be recovered this way,” he says. “Piracy does happen to be pretty good at preservation.”

UC Berkeley professor Abigail De Kosnik, who has investigated private trackers as part of her research on rogue online archives, agrees. “A great deal of media released today will persist via private servers, much like how a lot of silent films we have today were found as reels stored in people’s attics,” she says. “I think that private torrent trackers, which make possible [to download] many art films, indie films, smaller-budget films, films from many countries, will play a large part in constituting future archives of 20th and 21st century cultural productions.”

Copyright holders, unsurprisingly, often hold less favorable views of the private tracker community. “Private trackers are part of a broader piracy ecosystem,” says Larissa Knapp, executive vice president and chief content protection officer of the Motion Picture Association (MPA). “Content that first appears within a closed community can quickly migrate to streaming sites, cyberlockers, IPTV services, and other unauthorized platforms, significantly amplifying its reach and impact.”

Rightsholder groups have repeatedly gone after private trackers and their administrators with varying levels of success. Oink’s Pink Palace, the popular private music tracker, shut down in 2007 following raids in the Netherlands and the UK. Oink admin Alan Ellis was arrested and charged with conspiracy to defraud as part of the enforcement actions, but was later found not guilty in court. Shuttering the tracker also did little to stop file sharing. Oink was quickly succeeded by What.CD, which remained online for nearly a decade until finally closing down in 2016 following a raid on its data center.

These days, private file sharing communities aren’t as often in the news as they were a decade ago. Part of that is simply a matter of priority. Private trackers often cap the number of registered users; some of the most coveted communities have only 40,000 or fewer active members. Public sites like The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, still attract millions of file sharers, making it easier for commercial copyright enforcers to send out tens of thousands of legal notices to end users at a time — a practice that’s especially common in Europe.

Still, groups like the MPA, and its ACE anti-piracy arm, haven’t given up on going after private file sharing communities and their admins. “Private trackers are not beyond enforcement reach,” Knapp says. “Closed access can make an investigation more difficult, but it does not eliminate the legal or operational exposure for the people who run them. In my years in federal law enforcement, I learned that anonymity is rarely as complete as people believe. A private community is not a safe harbor. Every operation, no matter how closed, still depends on people, hosting and domain services, communications tools, and usually some way to move money. Each of those is a connection, and connections are what investigators follow.”

There’s also the moral questions of engaging in piracy, which don’t get easier to answer when you’re actively sharing thousands of files 24/7. “I am ethically conflicted about piracy,” Jane says. “I often feel guilty about it.” Jane tries to assuage some of her guilt by actively purchasing media she likes.

Others told me a similar version of this, while also stressing that piracy is simply more user-friendly and convenient than legal services. That’s especially true for users in developing countries. “A big part of it for me is accessibility,” says Maysay, whose choices in Pakistan are limited. “There’s a lot of content that simply isn’t easily available legally here.”

“In my years in federal law enforcement, I learned that anonymity is rarely as complete as people believe.”

The fast-moving copyright battle around AI adds further ambiguity to this debate. “Now that the fastest-growing corner of the knowledge industries relies on mass piracy — copying huge amounts of data that they download for free — I think that the anti-piracy rhetoric of the past quarter-century is looking a bit outdated,” says De Kosnik. “If anything, AI [companies] are anti-archival because they strip away attribution from the creators, whereas private trackers are intensely accurate in providing details about the source material. So, are large corporations to be trusted with archiving our culture?”

Still, some of the users I spoke to were also acutely aware that it’s hard for them to take the moral high road. “It may genuinely hurt smaller creators,” Odel admits. “I’m not a fan of the people who try to advocate for it being moral or anything. I tend to justify my own piracy under the lense of ‘I wouldn’t be watching x otherwise.’ Whether that would be true assuming I was suddenly unable to pirate anything, I do not know.”

Not everyone is as conflicted about using private trackers. “I own it, it’s piracy. I torrent this content because I find it very convenient and don’t want to pay for every audiobook, TV episode, movie, etc.,” says Marvin.

Marvin tells me he originally got into piracy for financial reasons. “It was a habit that started with me growing up poor,” he says. Nowadays, that’s less of an issue for him, and he does spend money on some content, including books and video games.

“But I am a pirate at heart,” Marvin acknowledges. “This is paid content that I am getting for free. I’ve never paid for a subscription to a major streamer, and at this point, I don’t see why I ever would.”