P2P services under widescale legal attack?

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.

ShareReactor however, made nothing near these figures in revenue, and you will find this out if you read through the interview. So the question is; where did SAFE get these figures? Since these figures were probably a major part of convincing the Swiss authorities to investigate ShareReactor, it's only fair that SAFE would provide the information they had which lead to the 15,000 euro a month claim they made to the authorities and the 76,000 euro claim that appeared in newspapers. Not many details are available yet on the ShareConnector case, but I don't think any of us will be surprised if we hear that the donated money was a huge reason behind the raids and arrests that took place.
On the 16th December, RespectP2P.org had a small announcement stating that the Admins of ShareConnector and Releases4u were released, but no more details were made available just yet. So it seems that one possibility is that the anti-piracy organizations need the sites to generate money to convince authorities to investigate, even though such linking sites have not exactly yet been declared illegal.
Youceff Torrents and Phoenix Torrents
Youceff Torrents was a French BitTorrent site that was raided in the past few days. The Administrator of the site has confirmed that the site will not return. Torrent sites have not yet been declared illegal either, as like eD2K linking sites, they do not offer any pirated files, only torrent files and maybe trackers which are basically like P2P servers, which are also not illegal. One of the most wanted affects of this crackdown is to see sites just closing their doors without having any major legal problems. This unfortunately has already started to happen. Phoenix Torrents have been scared by the current events and have left a message on the mainpage stating that the site has been closed and will not be back.
So it seems that the anti-piracy organizations worldwide along with law enforcement have decided to kill these popular P2P resources by forcing linking sites and servers down. While this will certainly have an effect, it won’t completely stop trading by BitTorrent, or cripple the eDonkey2000 network. It seems that these people who like to refer to each other as experts, have a lot more to learn about P2P. BitTorrent first came along in 2001; it's 2004 and now they finally take legal action on sites they say abuse the technology. A lot more than BitTorrent happened in the last three years.
We will keep you updated on new details of the recent actions and any new events as they come.