ShareConnector

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

~ the eulogy ~

I learned the name ShareConnector from a docket. Nobody outside the Netherlands needed a Dutch-language link index, and the site went past me entirely, so what follows is reconstructed out of a legal file rather than out of anything I saw. The file is unusually complete. The case ran for most of a decade after the site stopped existing.

What it indexed were ed2k links for the eDonkey network. It stored no files. An ed2k link is a line of text carrying a hash and a filename, and a link site is a list of those lines with some sense of which ones are worth pasting into a client. By 2004 ShareConnector was one of the two biggest such lists in the country, the other being Releases4U, and it ran on machines at a hosting company called Mindlab. No source records when it started. The oldest archived copy of the front page is from September 2002.

In the summer of 2004 the anti-piracy foundation BREIN sent a letter demanding that every eDonkey link come down or the administrators would be sued. They refused, on an argument that was taken seriously at the time. An ed2k link is not the file. It is a description of a file that some stranger elsewhere may or may not still be sharing. BREIN read that as hair-splitting, and Tim Kuik, who ran BREIN, later summarized the decision to act by saying they had run out of patience.

On 14 December 2004 the FIOD-ECD, the Dutch fiscal and economic crimes service, took the site down and carried the servers out of Mindlab. Accounts of how many machines left the building do not agree, four by one report and eleven by another. Releases4U went the same day.

That raid is the loudest thing that ever happened to ShareConnector and it is not what killed it. I have a legal record here and no memory at all, which for once suits the subject, because the ending everybody remembers is the one that failed.

~ the dossier ~

~ the restore ~

It came back on 19 December 2006, two years and five days after the seizure, rebuilt out of whatever backups had survived outside the building. The front page was restored from a copy taken on 23 November 2004. The forum accounts came from a copy taken three days before that. The posts themselves were not restored, and the discussion database opened empty.

A link index is a text dump and text dumps restore. Everything people had said around it did not, and the site that returned had the same name and the same lists with two years of silence poured into the middle of it.

~ the acquittal ~

A court had already found in June 2006 that BREIN had not produced enough evidence to convict anyone. The criminal trial ran in July 2007 and the administrator was acquitted on every charge. The court went further than that and held the original arrests unlawful, on the grounds that the state had moved on material assembled by a private organization with a commercial interest in the result. Releases4U came out of the same process with small fines.

~ the doorstep ~

On 12 November 2007 BREIN went to the administrator's home and told him to close the site or face a civil claim. He closed it that day. Two weeks later the civil case proceeded regardless.

The criminal system took three years to work out that it could not touch him. The private one took an afternoon and a doorbell.

~ what the appeal decided ~

The prosecution appealed the acquittal in August 2009, more than two years after losing it. The administrator's public answer was that they had failed before and would fail again, and that you cannot control the future if you do not understand the past.

In March 2010 the Amsterdam Court of Appeal ruled that a site offering hash links makes infringement easier and is unlawful on that basis, whether or not the person running it infringed anything himself. That is the ruling with consequences, and it landed when the site had been gone for over two years. In June 2010 a court in The Hague reopened the criminal side and summoned the public prosecutor as a witness, apparently unconvinced that a criminal case built on a private foundation's evidence had been the right instrument at all. There was nothing left by then to switch back on.

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