Pobieraczek.pl

» see pobieraczek.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Pobieraczek.pl opened in 2008 with an offer that sounded like every other download site of the period. Ten days free, then decide. Films and games, plus a category the Polish press tended to describe politely. The mascot was a cartoon crayfish on fire and the banner across the top of the site said Bezpiecznie i bez ograniczeń, safely and without limits.

The limit was on day ten. If you had not deleted your account by then, and deleting was the only exit the terms recognized, you were signed up and owed money. Letters followed, then warnings that non payment would go to court. Within nine months of launch more than thirty thousand complaints had been filed. Prosecutors opened an investigation and closed it without charges. The consumer regulator, UOKiK, fined the operating company 239,000 złoty. The site carried on taking registrations.

I never saw a Pobieraczek invoice. The trap needed a Polish address to mail the demand to and a Polish court to argue it in front of, so it stayed inside one country for the whole four years it ran. The design is the portable part, and it has been rebuilt in every market that has a billing system and a form.

~ the case file ~

~ what you were actually buying ~

Not films. The contract was for access to Usenet. The advertising was for a library of new releases, the paperwork you agreed to was a subscription to a text protocol from 1980 with binary groups attached, and those two things were deliberately not the same document. That gap is what the courts eventually ruled on.

The money involved per person was small enough that almost nobody fought it, which was the point of setting the price where it was set. When the refunds were finally ordered, each claimant got 94.80 złoty back. That is what an unnoticed subscription had quietly cost.

~ the certificate ~

In May 2010 the owners of Pobieraczek, a partnership registered as Eller Service, were awarded a Golden Certificate of Reliability by a Polish business scheme called Rzetelna Firma. By that point the regulator had already fined them and the complaint count was in the tens of thousands. Nobody involved in handing out the certificate appears to have checked either number.

~ the ruling, six years late ~

In spring 2012 a group of 181 former users joined a class action. In 2012 UOKiK fined the company a second time, 215,000 złoty. On 6 December 2012 Eller Service announced the service was finished. The same people then launched Plikostrada, run by Smart Tech Connect Ltd of Dubai on servers outside the European Union, on the stated reasoning that Polish civil courts could not reach it there.

On 26 March 2018 the Regional Court in Gdańsk ruled that the Usenet contracts were void for everyone who had joined the suit, and ordered the money returned. Ten years after the site opened, 181 people out of thirty thousand complainants got 94.80 złoty each. The domain today serves a WordPress news farm that has been publishing since 2023, which means the name has now spent longer as somebody's SEO project than it ever spent as a download service.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »