Kino.to

» see kino.to as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Kino.to sat behind a language I do not read. The interface was German and so was nearly everyone typing into it, which put the site out of reach for reasons that had nothing to do with the year or the connection. In 2008 I was a computer engineer in Ankara on TTNet broadband with plenty of hours to spend online. It simply was not written for anyone like me.

Dirk Böttcher registered the domain in March 2008 and built something that cost almost nothing to run. Kino.to hosted no films at all. It carried a poster grid and a set of outbound links to whatever cyberlocker held the file that week, and it sold the advertising wrapped around the grid. That separation between the catalog and the content was the entire legal theory, and it held for three years.

The Dresden prosecutors later put the site at more than 200,000 visitors and roughly four million clicks a day, which made it the most-visited German-language destination of its kind. Böttcher's advertising income, routed through a company registered in Spain, came to about 3.7 million euros. The total they read into the record for three years of operation was eight billion clicks.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the eighth of june ~

On 8 June 2011 police worked through apartments and server rooms in Germany, France, Spain and the Netherlands over one coordinated morning. Thirteen people were arrested that day. A fourteenth was picked up in November after months on the run. Kino.to went offline before the raids were finished and never came back.

The case had been worked up by the GVU, the German industry body that chases copyright infringement on behalf of film distributors, then handed to prosecutors in Dresden. What made it unusual for its era was the scale of the state response. This was not a civil takedown letter but a criminal operation across four jurisdictions, aimed at a site whose whole defense was that it had never held a single file.

~ what it cost him ~

Böttcher was sentenced on 14 June 2012 by the Leipzig state court to four years and six months, and ordered to pay back roughly 3.7 million euros in taxes on what he had earned. For a copyright case with no violence in it, that is a heavy number, and it was meant to be read as one.

The people around him did not walk either. The site's main administrator drew three years. A designer and several others got terms between one year nine months and three years ten months, handed down across December 2011 and April 2012.

~ what grew back ~

Kinox.to appeared on 10 July 2011, thirty-two days after the raid, copying the old layout closely enough that returning users barely had to relearn anything and calling itself the official successor. It has outlived the original by more than a decade. German authorities have been chasing it ever since with much less success, largely because nobody behind it registered a Spanish advertising company in their own name.

Turkey ran its own version of this arrangement in the same years, under domain names nobody outside the country ever typed. That was the ordinary shape of the streaming era before the licensed services arrived: every language got one of these, and it felt permanent to the people using it right up until the morning it did not.

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