Boerse.bz

» see boerse.bz as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Boerse.bz was a German-language forum where members posted links to copyrighted films and e-books stored on one-click file hosters. The board held no files itself. An uploader placed a release with a hoster and pasted the link into a thread, and the hoster paid a commission on the downloads that followed. The domain sat under .bz, the country code of Belize, and the operators said the servers stood in Canada.

It began as a sister board of Gulli, a nationally known German IT forum. Gulli shut most of its own download section, the Börse, on 11 August 2008 under legal pressure, and the trade moved next door. German Wikipedia dates Boerse.bz from 2007, while heise and the forum's own farewell both say 2008. The earliest Wayback capture of the domain is from October 2008.

By 2014 the forum claimed close to three million members. German Wikipedia gives more than four million clicks a day and rank 175 among the most visited sites in the country. The anti-piracy group GVU counted more than 100,000 unlicensed files behind the links, 61,776 of them films, and put the membership at 2.7 million. Uploaders with popular threads earned up to several thousand euros a month in hoster commissions.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the summer the moderators left ~

The end started in July 2014, when the administration put a country block on the download section. Visitors from Germany and England lost access to parts of the board, and for a while Austrians did too. The admins blamed growing pressure from rightsholders, and in the same breath they recommended a VPN subscription from hide.me as the way back in.

At the end of that month the whole moderator team resigned and said it was leaving for a new project. In August the project had an address, Boerse.to, and an offer: any Boerse.bz account could be activated there. From then on two boards with nearly the same name ran side by side. The book trade paper Börsenblatt put them at about 300,000 visitors a day between them.

~ 121 front doors ~

On 4 November 2014 the Cologne public prosecutor had 121 homes searched in 14 of the 16 federal states. Around 400 officers took part and carried out computers and hard drives. The targets were suspected uploaders, the people who fed the forum, and the searches followed a criminal complaint by the GVU. TorrentFreak reported the same day that nobody had been arrested and that the site was still up.

It stayed up for one more week. On the evening of Tuesday 11 November the forum was replaced by a short notice set like a German death announcement, with a star for the year of birth and a cross for the year of death: "* 2008 † 2014 Tschüss! Aufgrund der aktuellen Vorfälle haben wir uns entschlossen das Forum zu schließen." Because of the current incidents, we have decided to close the forum. GVU head Matthias Leonardy told heise he was pleased about the disappearance and expected investigators to identify the operators from the seized material.

~ one year, suspended ~

In 2020 the German scene blog Tarnkappe asked the cybercrime office in Cologne what had come of it all. The former operator had received a one-year suspended sentence, and it was final. The uploader cases had been handed to local prosecutors around the country, who never reported back, and prosecutor Christoph Hebbecker said the downloaders would most likely hear nothing more. Boerse.bz itself never came back. Boerse.to carried on with the old database under the greeting "Welcome, Pirates!".

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