FilesTube

» see filestube.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Turkey blocked www.filestube.com in January 2010 and the site went on living for another five years. So the local version of this obituary has the notice arriving in the middle of the story rather than at the end of it, which is a different shape from most of the file-sharing graves on this site. The thing was already unreachable from here while it was still growing.

FilesTube started in June 2007, run out of Poland by a company called Red-Sky. It held no files and offered no accounts. What it did was crawl the link pages and forum posts that pointed at cyberlockers, index the filenames it found there, and give you a search box over the result. You typed the name of an album or an episode and it handed you somebody else's server. RapidShare, Megaupload, MediaFire, 4shared: the files were always on those, and FilesTube was the map.

That was a real product problem it solved, and it solved it well enough to pull several million visitors a day at its height. Cyberlockers deliberately had no search. Their whole legal position rested on being dumb storage that happened to be pointed at by other people, so the index had to live outside them, and FilesTube built the biggest one. By 2012 the hosts themselves were pushing back: MediaFire started blocking traffic arriving from FilesTube searches in April of that year.

A country-level block in Turkey in 2010 was not really a wall. It was a sign. What it did was move a site out of the set of things you use and into the set of things you read about, and the reading was usually a news item about the block rather than anything about the site. FilesTube's biggest year, the one where it collected more takedown notices than anything else on the web, happened entirely on the far side of that sign.

~ the dossier ~

~ how the search actually worked ~

The defense FilesTube gave for seven years was always the same one, and it was not a stupid defense: we are a search engine exactly like Google is a search engine, carrying none of our own content and removing links when somebody asks us to. Point for point that is a fair description of what the code actually did. The reason it did not save them is that Google indexes the whole web while FilesTube indexed one part of it on purpose.

The mechanics mattered too. Because it was a meta-search, its results decayed constantly as the underlying lockers deleted files, so a lot of what it returned was already dead by the time you clicked. Regular users learned to read the result list for freshness signals rather than relevance. It was less like searching and more like checking whether a shipment had come in.

~ ten million ~

In December 2013 FilesTube became the first site on the internet to pass ten million URL removal requests in Google's transparency data. The exact figure was 10,074,633, against 5,914,229 for ZippyShare in second place. The requests came from 3,838 separate copyright holders through 1,270 reporting organizations, and the music industry did most of the work: the BPI and the RIAA between them de-indexed close to six million of its URLs.

The number is what killed it, though not in the way a lawsuit kills a site. Google was by then demoting domains with heavy removal histories, so ten million notices meant the search results that fed FilesTube's own traffic quietly stopped arriving. It moved to a.to domain in late 2013, which is what a site does when the.com has become a liability. The traffic never came back.

~ blocked at the country level ~

Three countries put it behind a block and Turkey went first by more than a year. The order here landed in January 2010, well ahead of Malaysia in June 2011 and the United Kingdom in October 2013. The Turkish block came under the 2007 law that set up a central authority to order sites closed, which by 2010 was already being pointed at things well beyond what anybody had argued for when it passed.

What is worth noticing is the ordering. The UK block arrived seven weeks before the ten million milestone, at the peak of the evidence against the site. The Turkish one arrived in 2010, when FilesTube was three years old and mostly unknown outside file-sharing circles. Whatever it was blocked for here, it was not blocked for the record it is now remembered by, because that record did not exist yet.

~ the second filestube ~

On 1 December 2014 the search was gone. The same domain answered with a title reading Watch Free TV Shows and Movies Online, and underneath it was a legitimate business: free streaming of licensed independent films and series. Red-Sky had decided the brand was worth more scrubbed than shut, and TorrentFreak wrote it up the day it happened.

It did not take. By July 2016 the address was redirecting to Viewster, a Swiss streaming service that had absorbed whatever was left. Today filestube.com does not answer at all: the name still resolves to an address, and nothing behind that address picks up. The map outlived the territory by about eighteen months and then went too.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »