James Delahunty
16 Dec 2004 21:34
As you all have read or noticed by now; some of the biggest P2P sites in existence have been shut down. The most targeted sites have been BitTorrent sites and eDonkey2000 linking sites. The power behind the eDonkey2000 network is the eD2K linking resources, which provide links to real files. ShareReactor was long regarded as the best eD2K linking site until it was shut down by Swiss authorities in March 2004. After ShareReactor was closed, ShareConnector became the next favorite eD2K linking site, but on the 14th of December the news circulated that ShareConnector had been shutdown by Dutch authorities. Also shutdown by Dutch authorities was Releases4U, another linking site.
Another major site that had eD2K links as well as being a huge BitTorrent resource was Finreactor. The Administrators of the Finnish site has their computers seized by the National Bureau of Investigation (Keskusrikospoliisi) after it received a request from Finnish copyright associations, including the BSA and Teosto (the Finnish equivalent of RIAA). Read about it here.
ShareReactor, ShareConnector, Releases4u and Finreactor
Each of the above sites had thousands of links to illegal files on the eDonkey2000 network, yet you have to question if legal action is justified. Whether or not an eD2K link is legal or not, is up for debate. In fact, it gets more interesting if you look at the cases of ShareReactor and ShareConnector. ShareReactor was a site that would receive angry "cease and desist" letters from corporations because of the links that were on the site on a regular basis, but in all that time, no serious action was taken until weeks after a pretty large amount of money was donated by the users to the site. Now in the case of ShareConnector, it is also in recent weeks that they started to receive donations from users for the site. Now if you look back again at the ShareReactor case, you will see that an anti-piracy organization, SAFE, had well over-estimated the revenue ShareReactor produced. This is a quote from an interview with Simon Moon, SR owner.
Q. Dela: Back to the Police Station for a moment. They kept you in for about 9 hours? What did they do all the time?
Simon Moon: Asked about SR. Asked me where money came in and where it went to. The whole thing lost pretty fast steam as they saw how big a loss SR produced every month, and how little money in total was flowing at all. SAFE told them something about 15'000 Euros income a month, while they told papers something about 76'000 Euros.