Intellectual Property Rights Holders Association Blog

Five years after the administrator of the eDonkey link site ShareConnector was found innocent in a criminal trial that was lead by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, the Department of Justice announced that it will appeal this verdict.

In 2004, when most of the BitTorrent sites only had regular visitors, ShareConnector was extremely popular as it served eDonkey links to millions of file-sharers every month. BREIN did not let this go unnoticed, however, which lead to a criminal investigation. This also headed into an investigation into the admin of ShareConnector and the people behind the site Release4U.

Both sites were eventually shut down with the assistance of BRIEN convincing the FIOD-ECD, a Fiscal Investigation Unit of the Dutch Police. The sites were not only shut down but the servers were placed under police custody for inspection in hopes of finding trace

BREIN had successfully convinced the FIOD-ECD – Fiscal Investigation Unit of the Dutch Police – to shut down both sites and take the servers into custody for a thorough inspection, hoping to discover criminal activities.

After the case went to court, the administrator of ShareConnector was found innocent and only handed a couple of small monetary fines. The ruling stated that FIOD-ECD did not provide evidence to support that ShareConnector was involved in copyright infringement or that the organizations were criminal in nature.

Although the Department did say in 2007 that it would appeal this verdict, nothing happened until this week when the Department finally filed the appeal.

The oldest BitTorrent site, FileSoup, has recently been targeted by police as well as anti-piracy officers. FilesSoups owner was arrested and further denied his phone call and legal representation for more than seven hours. His warrant was gained on July 27 and was backed up by the MPAA-funded UK anti-piracy group FACT. A raid on his home was then conducted. He was subsequently charged with Suspicion of downloading copyrighted movies.

The owner of FileSoup, known as The Geeker, said “I asked them [police] while still at home if I could contact a member of my family so that someone could come and make sure my dog was catered for, they said that I couldn’t. On the way to the police station I asked if they could contact someone to take care of the dog or if I could make a phone call, they again said I could not,”

FileSoup was founded in 2003 and is considered one of the original torrent sites. Although keeping a low profile, the site has built a solid reputation, and had survived the other popular torrent site, the Pirate Bay.

The warrant was issued under Section 109 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act of 1988. It allows the gathering of any evidence related to the illegal file distribution or file-sharing of copyright films. Although FileSoup has never hosted any copyright material, it has links to metadata which links to material hosted elsewhere.

To date, FileSoup still remains operable.

The founders of the Pirate Bay recently launched Video Bay, a video-sharing site.  The launch of this site came the same day when the controversial Pirate Bay site was sold to a Swedish software company.  Global Gaming Factory, located out of Sweden, purchased the Pirate Bay website for nearly $8 million.  This news comes recently after the Pirate Bay’s three founders and investor were found guilty of assisting in copyright infringement and ordered to pay a collective fine of nearly $4 million as well as being sentenced to a year in prison.  The founders appealed this judgment and were denied.  Pirate Bay has more than 20 million users and although does not store any copyrighted material, streams its content through its BitTorrent file-sharing technology.  
The new owner of the site is considering utilizing a new model by compensating content providers.  Global Gaming Factory said “We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for the content that is downloaded via the site.”  The Video Bay site is comparable to that of Google’s YouTube and comes with the warning “Don’t expect anything to work at all.”  The site offers a variety of music videos and television clips.