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[vernarial]

Source: Slyck
By: Thomas Mennecke

Slyck has been following the events surrounding ShareConnector's plight against the copyright industry for the last several years. Bred during a time when eDonkey2000 was the king of the file-sharing world, ShareConnector was one of the last remaining links to yesterday's P2P community. That link was severed on Monday as ShareConnector closed its doors.

ShareConnector was first mentioned on Slyck as a top alternative to ShareReactor in April of 2004. As many will remember, ShareReactor was the premier eDonkey2000 indexing site - few other sites compared to its size or power. The loss of ShareReactor was comparable to the temporary shutdown of ThePirateBay, forcing millions of file-sharers to find to a new site to call home.

ShareConnector filled that void. However, its rise to prominence would be hampered by the Dutch copyright authority, BREIN. Only a few months after Slyck's initial article, BREIN sent a legal demand to ShareConnector. The demand stipulated that ShareConnector remove all links to copyrighted material on the eDonkey2000 network. ShareConnector is of the contention that it doesn't link to copyrighted material, nor does it store copyrighted material on their severs.

The differing philosophies on copyright intellectualism led to a time consuming criminal trial, led by the FIOD-ECD (Dutch Fiscal and Economic Police) and the Public Prosecutor. The criminal copyright infringement trial didn't conclude until July of this year. At stake was BREIN's assertion that meta-linking to content on the eDonkey2000 network was copyright infringement. If they lost, it would derail their enforcement campaign against similar sites. If ShareConnector won, it would give a de facto legality, in at least the Netherlands, to BitTorrent and eDonkey2000 indexing sites.

So who won? Neither. After a disappointingly long legal process, none of the legal questions on linking were settled. Instead, the administrator of ShareConnector was cleared of all charges only because BREIN lacked enough evidence for a conviction. However the Judge found that ShareConnector could be held responsible for copyright infringement. And as it turns out, the legal claim against ShareConnector didn’t die with the lack of a conviction. BREIN instead turned to the civil court process, where it appears they have enough leverage to force ShareConnector offline.

Full Article

[demon guy]

I used to work on the shareconnector p2p forum, damn shame its not going any more,