Fenglin Net (楓林網)

» see 8maple.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The two men who built this site were software engineers with masters degrees from Taiwan's best university, which is more or less the job description I have been writing on forms for twenty years. That is the only part of the story I recognize from the inside. Everything else belongs to an island I have never visited, serving a drama audience that was never mine.

They were 33 and 32 when they were arrested, surnamed Chen and Chuang, friends from the same graduate program who had both finished near the top of it. 楓林網 started in 2014. It carried unlicensed streams of Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean and Thai drama alongside Western film, which covers most of what a Taiwanese household actually sits down to watch.

By 2020 it was doing around thirty million visits a month and clearing between two and four million New Taiwan dollars monthly from advertising wrapped around the player. The prosecutors' final accounting of what the pair took out of it over six years came to NT$76,002,576.

~ the case file ~

~ twenty-five servers ~

The infrastructure is the part an engineer notices first. They rented twenty-five cloud servers across the United States, Canada, Ukraine, France and Romania at about NT$300,000 a month, and ran the whole operation from a flat in Taoyuan. Around twenty related sites hung off the same setup.

None of it is clever in a technical sense. It is ordinary operations work done carefully, pointed at content they had no right to hold. The spread across jurisdictions was the defense, since no single country's police could unplug the thing, so the police went after the two people instead.

~ how they were found ~

The advertising is what exposed them. To sell inventory at the volume thirty million monthly visits could support, they registered a real advertising company in Taiwan with real paperwork on it, and paperwork carries names. Investigators followed the invoices back to Taoyuan.

The Criminal Investigation Bureau had help from outside. The US Motion Picture Association and Japan's Content Overseas Distribution Association had both been pushing the case, alongside Taiwan's own broadcasters. Authorities put the copyright damage at around NT$1 billion.

~ the sentence ~

Police arrested both men in Badou, Taoyuan on 31 March 2020 and froze roughly NT$60 million in assets, including two luxury apartments bought recently enough to be conspicuous. None of it was announced publicly until 8 April, by which point the site had been dark for a week and Taiwanese viewers had worked out on their own that something had happened. Prosecutors filed charges on 9 November 2020.

Each man received eighteen months in prison and was ordered to return NT$58 million. A counterfeit 楓林網 was up by that November, riding the name with a fraction of the traffic and a decent chance of malware attached to it. Six years of audience building transferred to nobody.

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