Matti Robinson
12 Feb 2008 7:50
Christian Riesen (aka Simon Moon), the admin of the late eDonkey link site, was found guilty of copyright infringement in Swiss district court of Frauenburg. Almost four years after Sharereactor.com was shut down by the local authorities, Riesen has been ordered to pay 4700 Swiss francs (approx. 4250 USD) in compensation.
Sharereactor.com was one of the most popular ED2K link sites and was visited daily by up to 250,000 visitors during its golden age in 2004. The admin didn't however make any kind of profit, more like the opposite. In an interview with "Moon" in October 2004 the admin claimed that he was paying around 5,000 dollars, more than the compensation the court seeks, a month just to keep up with the bandwidth demand of the popular website.
Sharereactor came back online in 2006 and at the same time Riesen told he had sold the domain. However, the comeback was brief, most likely due to the fact that many users had already switched to BitTorrent.
As this is written Sharereactor.com is maintained by Riesen, the domain is registered to Riesen Industries, which operates from Canada, but the site welcomes visitors with a "Host sharereactor.com is under construction" text.