EX.UA: A Ukrainian detective story with copyright and innocent people involved?

Last night, it was announced that Ukraine's largest file-sharing service, EX.UA, had gone offline. Later, it was reported that the service (as well as its domain) had been suspended due to lawsuits against the site's owners and users.

All evening, the Ukrainian internet was actively discussing the incident, with journalists trying to get details on yet another high-profile case, which can be placed on a par with those of Infostore, Prostoprint, Torrents.ru, and even MegaUpload, in its international equivalent.

That evening, it was announced that the service had been shut down by law enforcement agencies as part of a criminal investigation into copyright and related rights violations. Police cited a lawsuit filed by "official representatives of leading global software manufacturers—international corporations such as Adobe Systems Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Graphisoft Inc., and others—whose software products had long been illegally distributed through the EX.ua website." However, Microsoft later denied any involvement in the "EX.UA case."

Again, in the evening it became known that operatives conducted a search of the company's office and seized servers.

However, within a few hours, it became known that the site belonged to a Latvian citizen. Furthermore, one of the EX.UA administration representatives, Yuriy Piskovoy, stated that no one had accessed the servers.confiscatedMoreover, the company does not have an office in Ukraine, and its servers are hosted by several companies, including abroad.

Piskov also claimed that EX.UA is owned by a Western investor who plans to legalize the website. However, according to Piskov, the domain's delegation was indeed suspended—"based on an order from some investigator in the Pechersk district."

Clearly, there are more than enough inconsistencies in the explanations given by the police and the resource's administration. Law enforcement officials said they plan to identify the users who distributed content through the file-sharing resource. Yuri Piskovoy reportedKommersant newspaperThe resource cooperated with copyright holders and promptly removed content upon their request. However, many copyright holders wanted to know the names of violators, who are protected by personal data laws. Piskovoy believes that such actions against the resource's administration are one way to obtain information about those posting pirated content.

The "EX.UA case" was, in fact, a continuation of the global push by copyright holders to defend their rights. First came SOPA, an attempt to pass a law in the US that would grant virtually unlimited rights to copyright holders, including the right to shut down any website even without a court order. The entire global community spoke out against SOPA, and before the furor had even died down, news broke of the arrest of the founders of the file-sharing service MegaUpload.

It's possible that similar cases of excessive attention to file hosting services and simply services with user content will occur more than once.