ClubBox (클럽박스)

» see clubbox.co.kr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

ClubBox handed out a hundred gigabytes of storage to anyone who asked. You opened a box, and the box was not really yours: it was storage bolted onto a community that already lived somewhere else, a Naver cafe or a forum with its own front door. The service said as much on its own pages, describing itself as a free rental data room built for online communities. One account could hold ten boxes.

The strange part, and the part that explains the rest of it, is that nobody could search for a box. ClubBox stated this plainly: it did not provide any function for searching the addresses of boxes that had been opened, and to visit somebody else's box you had to type the URL in yourself and then join. A company that stored other people's files for fourteen years never built an index of them. You got in because a person gave you the address.

It opened in July 2004, built by Nowcom, a Seoul company that would later rename itself after its other product, the live streaming service Afreeca. At its height the operator counted as many as seventeen million members across ClubBox and its sister site PDBox, with over a million people arriving on an ordinary day. The storage business was split off under a new name, Zetamedia, in the summer of 2011, and you can watch the handover happen in the footer, where the Nowcom logo stops being captured in May and the Zetamedia logo starts in August.

On 6 March 2019 it stopped. The homepage had carried no warning in November, and none in the last capture before the end, taken on 25 February. By lunchtime on the sixth the address was serving a different page entirely.

~ the chronicle ~

~ fifty kilobytes a second ~

Uploading was free and downloading was free, which sounds like a company with no revenue until you find the throttle. A free download came out at fifty kilobytes a second. Paying lifted the cap. ClubBox was not selling storage, it was selling the difference between a file that arrived this evening and a file that arrived next week.

Underneath that sat an economy with its own weather. A default box held a hundred gigabytes and deleted anything older than thirty days. A gold box, which you were promoted into on performance, kept its files permanently and grew to two terabytes. Demoted boxes went to bronze, where every bronze box on the entire service drew from one shared five terabyte pool, so when that pool filled nobody in the tier could upload anything at all. Sitting on the site earned ten mileage points an hour against a ceiling of twenty thousand, and the points bought download vouchers that expired in days. For a while there was a faster tier paying twelve points an hour instead of ten, and the extra two were rent: it used part of your own computer to help deliver files to other people. That was abolished in January 2012.

Paying for download speed is where this stops translating. Where I was, file sharing was free and plainly illegal in the same breath, and what made a download slow was some stranger's upstream rather than a tariff. Korea built a commercial layer over the same behavior, with coupons and a mileage balance you could watch going up, and that layer is what eventually ended up in court.

~ the summer the ceo went to jail ~

On 12 June 2008 the high-tech crime unit of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office applied for pre-trial arrest warrants against seven web storage companies. The court granted five of them on 16 June and Nowcom was one. Its chief executive, Moon Yong-sik, was taken into custody the following day on a charge of aiding the illegal distribution of films and digital content, with ClubBox and PDBox named in the case, and was released on bail on 29 July against a hundred million won, half of that paid in cash. Six weeks inside.

The prosecution's theory was that the companies paid professional heavy uploaders a tenth of the download fees their files earned, which turns infringement into a revenue line rather than an accident. Nowcom's statement the day after the arrest argued for a different reason entirely. It said the real cause was AfreecaTV, which had carried the beef-protest candlelight demonstrations live to more than seven million viewers in the preceding fortnight, and it noted that Soribada had ignored rights holders outright and been handled with a fine rather than a cell. What the court finally decided, I could not find.

Four years later the state closed the category off at the entrance. From 21 May 2012 a webhard service had to register as a special-type telecommunications operator, which meant three hundred million won of capital and monitoring staff on duty around the clock, with prison or a fine of a hundred and fifty million won for running one without the paperwork. On the first day the government counted seventy-four operators and published two different figures for how many sites that was, ninety in one release and a hundred and three in another. By February 2019 there were forty-three operators left.

~ the points moved first ~

The page that went up on 6 March explained the money. Cash and reward points became FileCity partner points, and capacity vouchers became FileCity download coupons. Passes carried over with their remaining days intact, and there was a button on the page to run the conversion.

The notice about files was not there on the sixth. It appears in the captures taken between then and the ninth, under a heading about file migration. It answers the only question anybody had. Where are the files I uploaded? They were not migrated, because it was not possible to judge whether or not they were copyrighted. That is the whole reason given. The new operator could not sort the legal from the illegal, so it kept neither.

What it offered instead was a form. You sent your account ID and the name of your box to an email address by 11 March, and from 12 March the replies would go out carrying a download path. The address was mflex107 at naver.com, a personal account on a free Korean mail service, standing in as the recovery desk for a site that had counted its users in the millions. The notice ended by warning that downloading copyrighted files could bring legal responsibility later, so the only route back to your own uploads arrived with a caution that taking it might be held against you.

No reason for any of it was ever published. The operator had not collapsed: Zetamedia's own site was still answering into October 2019, seven months after the service it ran had gone. FileCity is still trading and its homepage says nothing about where its partner points came from. ClubBox's addresses still resolve, and clubbox.com still redirects to the old Korean host, where an Apache with nothing behind it returns a two hundred and nine byte Forbidden page.

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