Malicious Intent
May 6th, 2004, 10:41 AM
For those that care, I got this e-mail:
Dear FastTrackMovies Member:
We are proud to announce the return of our site at http://sharethefiles.com/ !
You are receiving this e-mail because at one point in the last 2 years you have registered a username with us. I must begin by apologising for this e-mail if you already know of our return or you have recently become a new member at our new site ShareTheFiles.com.
It may have been a long time since you have heard from us. A lot has happened since we were shut down by the MPAA. The paragraphs below will give you an insight into what has happened, and inform you of our plans for the future...
FastTrackMovies was shut down back in August 2003 and we have been busy revamping it for the last half a year.
It all started when the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), which represents the big movie companies such as Universal, sent an e-mail to our Hosting Company saying that we were offering copyrighted files and that the site should be shut down. This was, of course, completely false. We have never hosted files on our server and have always clamped down on any direct web links to files (and at any rate we would not be able to handle the bandwidth that this would generate if we did host the actual files). In turn, our Hosting provider shut down the site, opting to side with the MPAA rather than investigate themselves whether or not we were breaking any rules.
When we challenged what they alleged, the MPAA basically agreed that we didn't host files but instead said that what we were providing was unlawful by nature due to the USA's DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998), which contradicts our civil rights and the basics of democracy in the civil rights system. Using the powers vested to them with that act, the MPAA could keep us shut down until we proved that we were not guilty. Basically guilty until proven innocent; if the glove doesn't fit, we'll make it fit. They didn't need hard facts to do it; by just saying that we were guilty it was enough to keep us shut down. Of course we wanted to prove that we were not guilty of breaking any laws, but we didn't have $20,000 lying around to fight a multi-million dollar organisation. So we chose the only option we could -- we took the last backup we did of our website (thankfully 3 days before we were shut down) and moved the site outside the borders of the US.
As many of you already know, the previous owner of the site passed the site and old domain over to `·. ZiN `·.. In order to keep the site up legally, `·. ZiN `·. got a pretty substantial loan in order to buy Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and Microsoft SQL Server 2000. This means that (with monthly server costs and excluding the amount of money he paid for the actual server) he is paying about $800 a month just to keep the site up and running. Keep in mind he is not even getting close to half that in donations, so every little bit helps. At any rate our resident web designer H2O then got his hands on the code for the site and as they say, the rest is history. Without him this site, as you see it, would not have happened!
A big thank you also to EclipseGSX, TheFaimousOne and Stoepsel who helped with quite a bit of the coding, as well as Nikeus for running the backup forum for us all this time! I would also like to thank all other staff which put a lot of their time into this website. You know who you are...
So FastTrackMovies is now ShareTheFiles -- we've gone beyond the world of just FastTrack and now cater for the popular ed2k network and even offer magnet links (which should soon become a standard for Kazaa). Shortly down the road you can expect some major integrations with the BitTorrent network as well..
The new features that we have added that you could have access to are...
1) FastTrack Sources on a film - This allows you to see the average amount of sources you can expect for a film on any supernode around the world before even clicking on the Sig2Dat or Magnet link. Coming soon: ed2k.
2) Detailed Film Information - Not just the name, we're talking bitrates, resolutions, source of rip (i.e. DVD rip, TS, TC, etc.), Release Group, NFO and imdb links, voting from members and staff, and more. This is by far the most complete database available anywhere on the Web.
3) Increased Forum diversity - Again like the site the forum now caters for so much more - check it out - http://www.ShareTheFiles.org
Theres not much more to add to this EMail, the rest is available in the forums and on the site, the URLs again are:
http://ShareTheFiles.com - Main Site
http://www.ShareTheFiles.org - Forum
We look forward to having your support with our new ventures. Help bring P2P back to where it belongs!
Remember: Share Knowledge, Share Thoughts and ShareTheFiles!
BuzzB2K, EclipseGSX, H2O, Nikeus, TheFaimousOne & `·. ZiN `·.
- ShareTheFiles.com Administration
Dear FastTrackMovies Member:
We are proud to announce the return of our site at http://sharethefiles.com/ !
You are receiving this e-mail because at one point in the last 2 years you have registered a username with us. I must begin by apologising for this e-mail if you already know of our return or you have recently become a new member at our new site ShareTheFiles.com.
It may have been a long time since you have heard from us. A lot has happened since we were shut down by the MPAA. The paragraphs below will give you an insight into what has happened, and inform you of our plans for the future...
FastTrackMovies was shut down back in August 2003 and we have been busy revamping it for the last half a year.
It all started when the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), which represents the big movie companies such as Universal, sent an e-mail to our Hosting Company saying that we were offering copyrighted files and that the site should be shut down. This was, of course, completely false. We have never hosted files on our server and have always clamped down on any direct web links to files (and at any rate we would not be able to handle the bandwidth that this would generate if we did host the actual files). In turn, our Hosting provider shut down the site, opting to side with the MPAA rather than investigate themselves whether or not we were breaking any rules.
When we challenged what they alleged, the MPAA basically agreed that we didn't host files but instead said that what we were providing was unlawful by nature due to the USA's DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998), which contradicts our civil rights and the basics of democracy in the civil rights system. Using the powers vested to them with that act, the MPAA could keep us shut down until we proved that we were not guilty. Basically guilty until proven innocent; if the glove doesn't fit, we'll make it fit. They didn't need hard facts to do it; by just saying that we were guilty it was enough to keep us shut down. Of course we wanted to prove that we were not guilty of breaking any laws, but we didn't have $20,000 lying around to fight a multi-million dollar organisation. So we chose the only option we could -- we took the last backup we did of our website (thankfully 3 days before we were shut down) and moved the site outside the borders of the US.
As many of you already know, the previous owner of the site passed the site and old domain over to `·. ZiN `·.. In order to keep the site up legally, `·. ZiN `·. got a pretty substantial loan in order to buy Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and Microsoft SQL Server 2000. This means that (with monthly server costs and excluding the amount of money he paid for the actual server) he is paying about $800 a month just to keep the site up and running. Keep in mind he is not even getting close to half that in donations, so every little bit helps. At any rate our resident web designer H2O then got his hands on the code for the site and as they say, the rest is history. Without him this site, as you see it, would not have happened!
A big thank you also to EclipseGSX, TheFaimousOne and Stoepsel who helped with quite a bit of the coding, as well as Nikeus for running the backup forum for us all this time! I would also like to thank all other staff which put a lot of their time into this website. You know who you are...
So FastTrackMovies is now ShareTheFiles -- we've gone beyond the world of just FastTrack and now cater for the popular ed2k network and even offer magnet links (which should soon become a standard for Kazaa). Shortly down the road you can expect some major integrations with the BitTorrent network as well..
The new features that we have added that you could have access to are...
1) FastTrack Sources on a film - This allows you to see the average amount of sources you can expect for a film on any supernode around the world before even clicking on the Sig2Dat or Magnet link. Coming soon: ed2k.
2) Detailed Film Information - Not just the name, we're talking bitrates, resolutions, source of rip (i.e. DVD rip, TS, TC, etc.), Release Group, NFO and imdb links, voting from members and staff, and more. This is by far the most complete database available anywhere on the Web.
3) Increased Forum diversity - Again like the site the forum now caters for so much more - check it out - http://www.ShareTheFiles.org
Theres not much more to add to this EMail, the rest is available in the forums and on the site, the URLs again are:
http://ShareTheFiles.com - Main Site
http://www.ShareTheFiles.org - Forum
We look forward to having your support with our new ventures. Help bring P2P back to where it belongs!
Remember: Share Knowledge, Share Thoughts and ShareTheFiles!
BuzzB2K, EclipseGSX, H2O, Nikeus, TheFaimousOne & `·. ZiN `·.
- ShareTheFiles.com Administration