FileSoup

» see filesoup.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

FileSoup went online in February 2003, which made it older than The Pirate Bay by more than half a year. Its front page called it "the first and foremost BitTorrent community on the Web", and the word it cared about was community. The site ran forums where people helped each other with clients and trackers, and it kept a large FAQ database. "We firmly believe education and community spirit are the key," the welcome text said, "not just to BitTorrent's success, but to the future of filesharing." According to TorrentFreak it had not operated a tracker or hosted any copyrighted content since 2005.

On Monday 27 July 2009 police and the Federation Against Copyright Theft raided the home of the owner, known online as TheGeeker. He was arrested and questioned on an initial charge worded "Distribute Article Infringing Copyright". The home of a second administrator, Snookered, was raided around the same time.

Then the site disappeared for a reason that had nothing to do with the case. On 6 January 2010 FileSoup went dark without warning because its hosting company, JMHServices, had stopped paying its own bills and vanished with customers' money. TheGeeker told TorrentFreak he hoped to rebuild with volunteers, and mentioned that his next bail date was 13 April. The forums did return, and ran until he closed them himself in June 2012.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a civil matter after all ~

By the time the case reached its end the charge was conspiracy to infringe copyright. On 24 February 2011 the Crown Prosecution Service dropped it. The CPS had concluded that the alleged offenses were a civil matter and declined to spend more public money. "The prosecution relied solely on one-sided evidence provided by the anti-piracy group FACT and was not able to build a case," said David Cook, the solicitor for Snookered. His firm, Burrows Bussin, had already defended Alan Ellis of OiNK, whom a jury acquitted on 15 January 2010, and TorrentFreak counted FileSoup as the second British BitTorrent prosecution to fail. Snookered called it "a long and stressful 18 months".

~ domains to the highest bidder ~

Winning did not refill the forums. TorrentFreak wrote of a mass exodus after the arrests, and by 2012 only a handful of people were checking in each day, where tens of thousands once had. The member table still held 1,043,311 registered accounts. "Filesoup has had a great run," TheGeeker wrote in his farewell, and he described the nine years as "truly an awesome ride". His stated reason was private: "Things happening in my personal life have changed the priorities I am able to place on time and effort to things."

He refused to sell the database. The two addresses, filesoup.com and filesoup.co.uk, were offered to the highest bidder as a piece of BitTorrent history. The splash page stayed up for weeks after the announcement, still showing its donation bar: "0% of July's running costs are met". By 27 November 2012 filesoup.com was forwarding to Vertor, a torrent index. It does not resolve today.

I was in Turkey in 2003, in the internet cafe years, and BitTorrent reached the people around me later and through the big public indexes. A British forum with a rules page and a monthly donation target was a different kind of place from anything on my screen.

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