Zeropaid.com

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

~ the eulogy ~

The downloading part of this I was in. Internet cafes around 2003, MP3s coming down a TTNet line at home, whatever client happened to be working that month. The English-language news desk that covered the whole thing from above was a different layer entirely, written for and by people who followed the lawsuits, and I was not one of its readers. Zeropaid ran that desk for seventeen years.

It launched in March 2000, built by Jorge A. Gonzalez and Chris Hedgecock, at the exact moment Napster turned file sharing into a public argument. The site was part news desk and part forum, with a software directory bolted on, and its early usefulness was extremely practical: Gnutella had no central server, so finding a node to connect to was the first problem every new user hit. Zeropaid published a server of the moment, a working address you could paste into your client, which made it one of the doors into a decentralized network that had no front door by design.

The coverage grew up alongside the technology it followed. Napster gave way to Gnutella, and Gnutella eventually to BitTorrent, and Zeropaid tracked every shift along with the legal machinery grinding along behind it. Jared Moya joined the news staff in 2005 and Drew Wilson in 2007. The site ran interviews with Michael Geist and with the Pirate Party of Canada, and it got quoted in The Economist and once, improbably, on E! News.

~ the dossier ~

~ the wall of shame ~

In 2000 the site did something it never quite lived down. It ran a Wall of Shame listing the IP addresses of Gnutella users it said had searched for child exploitation material. The intention was obvious and the method was not defensible: an IP address is not a person, the searches were logged by a private site with no oversight, and the whole thing amounted to publishing an accusation list assembled by whoever happened to be running the crawler.

It got attention, which was probably part of the point, and it is the reason a certain kind of privacy writer never trusted the place afterward.

~ the long decline ~

Regular news writing thinned out from about 2013. The forums went quiet before the news did. What was left after that was a WordPress install serving old articles to search engines, which is the state a great many early web properties settle into and stay in for years, technically alive and doing nothing.

In May 2017 the site simply went off the air. It came back thirty-seven days later with no explanation, which read at the time like a hosting problem someone eventually got around to fixing.

~ christmas day ~

On 25 December 2017 zeropaid.com began returning a database connection error. Drew Wilson, who had written for the site for a decade, tweeted at both the admin account and the official account on 27 December and received no reply. It was still down more than a year later when Freezenet checked in February 2019, and it never came back after that.

There is no shutdown post to link to. Nobody wrote the seventeen-year retrospective, including the site that would have covered it if it had happened to somebody else.

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