Demonoid seized by Ukrainian Govt. as gift to the USA
Ryan Martin / 12 years ago
Many users of the BitTorrent site Demonoid were shocked to see the site go offline. After hearing it was “only” a large DDoS attack many were relieved. Now it emerges that it has been seized by the Ukrainian Government.
During the middle of last week, in the wake of the DDoS attack, government investigators arrived at ColoCall, Demonoid’s DataCenter host, to shut Demonoid down.
“Investigators have copied all the information from the servers Demonoid and sealed them,” an anonymous ColoCall source confirmed. “Some equipment was not seized, but now it does not work, and we were forced to terminate the agreement with the site.”
The seizure of Demonoid is the largest BitTorrent incident in recent times, the only other “similar” event we have seen is MegaUpload but that is vastly different given the fact it is not a BitTorrent based service. Despite general opinion that Demonoid did not contravene Ukranian law, especially since it blocked all Ukranian IP addresses to avoid upsetting the locals, the site still attracted the attention of the authorities there.
It is reported that the seizure of Demonoid was performed as a gift to the USA to reinforce the Ukrainian position on being strong against copyright infringement. Even though Demonoid’s servers are in custody, its Admin(s) remain free as they were not named to authorities by ColoCall. They are reported to be based in Mexico, so we could expect to see them prosecuted in the near future should the American authorities manage to track them down.
