OdSiebie.com

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

~ the last words ~

OdSiebie.com was a Polish file host built on the RapidShare pattern. You uploaded a file and got back a link, and the link went into a forum thread that did the rest of the distribution for you. The company behind it was JC SYSTEM of Wrocław and the beta opened in June 2008.

Sixteen months later it was past two million users. The number worth keeping is not that one though. OdSiebie was in the top ten sites Polish Opera Mini users opened, which means a serious share of its traffic was phones running a proxy browser, in a country where fixed broadband had not finished arriving. A file locker that works on a compressed mobile connection is a different product from one that assumes a desktop and a download manager.

On 30 October 2009 the police closed it. FOTA and ZPAV, the two Polish rights organizations, appeared alongside the Wrocław prosecutors to announce it at a press conference. The Anti-Piracy Coalition afterwards handed the Wrocław provincial police headquarters a Złota Blacha, a golden plate, as a prize for effective work against piracy.

I was on RapidShare and its imitators in those years, on a TTNet line, watching the free-tier countdown tick down like everybody else. The category is familiar. The Polish half of it is not, and there is no reason it would be: a file host is worth exactly as much as the forum pointing at it, and those forums were in Polish.

~ the record ~

~ the trial nobody covered ~

The owners were charged with aiding the unlawful copying and distribution of films and software. That case took until 2013 to reach a verdict, and the verdict was an acquittal on every count. The court went past acquitting them and criticized the competence of the investigators and of the auxiliary prosecutors who had attached themselves to the case.

Nobody held a press conference for that part. The raid got the rights bodies, the prosecutors and the medal. The judgment got a paragraph.

~ what answers at the domain ~

odsiebie.com still resolves and still returns 200. The body is fifteen bytes: an opening html tag, a closing one, nothing in between. Its Last-Modified header reads 1 December 2016 and the whole thing sits behind Cloudflare, so somebody has been paying a CDN for a decade to serve an empty document.

You cannot look at the old one either. The Wayback Machine answers requests for odsiebie.com with an exclusion notice rather than a capture, which is rare enough that it is worth saying out loud. The service is gone and so is any record of what it looked like. The acquittal survives on Wikipedia, in one sentence.

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