YIFY

» see yify-torrents.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Small file size was the entire product. That reads like nothing today, when a phone streams 4K without anyone thinking about it, but for most of the world in 2011 it was the only variable that mattered. A copy you could actually finish downloading beat a better copy you could not.

YIFY started in 2010. Yiftach Swery was a computer science student at the University of Waikato working out of a house in Auckland, and the tag was his own name folded in half. He encoded films in x264 at roughly a tenth of the size of a Blu-ray rip and pushed them out under a consistent label. The official website came in August 2011.

The label did the work. By 2013 "yify" was the most searched term on Kickass Torrents, ahead of any actual film title, and people were typing "yify 1080p" as if it named a format rather than a person. On The Pirate Bay, 72 of the top 100 HD movie listings carried it. In August 2015 the YTS site pulled 3.4 million unique visitors and 43 million page views. Across five years the group put out more than 4,500 titles, by the end at a rate of several a day.

Encoding people hated it. The 1080p releases went soft where a real rip held detail, and 5.1 audio was missing entirely, so what you got was a stereo mix and a picture that fell apart on a large screen. The complaint was correct and it never mattered outside the forums where it was made.

This is where the geography sits. i came up on a 33.6k modem and then years of Turkish broadband sold by one number and delivered by another, and the arithmetic YIFY was doing is arithmetic that everyone on a line like that already did in their head. The group was in New Zealand and the lawsuit was American. The reason the tag traveled is that most of the internet was not on an American connection.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the compression actually meant ~

There is a version of this story where YIFY is a distribution operation. The more useful version is that it was a preference engine with one setting. Every release answered the same question the same way: given a choice between fidelity and reach, take reach. That trade is what every codec argument since has been about, and the mass market has landed on the same side of it every time.

It also standardized something. Before the tag, picking a copy meant reading a comment thread and guessing. After it, a name in the filename was a promise about size and about the shape of the file you were getting. Trust is a strange thing to build inside a piracy scene, and it is most of what got sued.

~ how it ended ~

Swery had stepped back from encoding in January 2014. The site was rebranded YTS, read as YIFY Torrent Solutions, and the work went to people already on the team. A UK company was incorporated on 5 February 2015. In March the French registry suspended the domain and the site moved to yts.to inside a couple of weeks. All of that looks like a group tidying up its legal position, which is what makes the next part read oddly.

On 12 October 2015 the MPAA filed in the High Court of New Zealand against the man it named as the operator, asking for millions and accusing him of facilitating and encouraging copyright infringement on a large scale. The site went offline without a word. On 30 October the shutdown was confirmed as permanent. A month after that Swery settled out of court and signed a non-disclosure agreement, which is why the number has never been public.

~ the long tail ~

The name did not die with the group. YTS.AG appeared almost immediately, run by people with no connection to the original, and a decade later sites carrying the YIFY and YTS branding are still up and still using the encoding style, trading on a reputation earned by someone who signed a settlement to make it stop. Whatever Swery agreed to in that document, he cannot have agreed to that.

The MPAA took the win publicly and paired it with Popcorn Time, which went down in the same operation. The honest reading is that the enforcement worked exactly as designed on the person and not at all on the thing. One student in Auckland stopped. The tag he built out of his own name is still sitting on the front page of a piracy site he has nothing to do with.

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