AfterDawn: News

Sharereactor admin found guilty

Christian Riesen (aka Simon Moon), the admin of the late eDonkey link site, was found guilty of copyright infringement in Swiss district court of Frauenburg. Almost four years after Sharereactor.com was shut down by the local authorities, Riesen has been ordered to pay 4700 Swiss francs (approx. 4250 USD) in compensation.

Sharereactor.com was one of the most popular ED2K link sites and was visited daily by up to 250,000 visitors during its golden age in 2004. The admin didn't however make any kind of profit, more like the opposite. In an interview with "Moon" in October 2004 the admin claimed that he was paying around 5,000 dollars, more than the compensation the court seeks, a month just to keep up with the bandwidth demand of the popular website.



Sharereactor came back online in 2006 and at the same time Riesen told he had sold the domain. However, the comeback was brief, most likely due to the fact that many users had already switched to BitTorrent.

As this is written Sharereactor.com is maintained by Riesen, the domain is registered to Riesen Industries, which operates from Canada, but the site welcomes visitors with a "Host sharereactor.com is under construction" text.

Written by: Matti Robinson @ 12 Feb 2008 7:50

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• 9 comments

• ikari

  A $5,000 court decision is not bad. I would pay it and be done with it. Better than millions and/or jail time.

  12.2.2008 13:16 #1

• LOCOENG

  Very lenient, a slap on the wrist really.

  12.2.2008 13:20 #2

• domie

  Quote:The admin didn't however make any kind of profit, more like the opposite the admin claimed that he was paying around 5,000 dollars, more than the compensation the court seeks, a month just to keep up with the bandwidth demand of the popular website. several points to make here
  
  1) the site was almost unreachable for years even when online due to numbers and limited bandwidth.
  2) advertising was common on the site as were pop-ups
  3) 2004 was not its golden age - it was taken down in February of 2004
  4) He made a huge donations appeal ( twice ) just before the plug was pulled in order to buy better server equipment and more bandwidth and announced himself that in total over $ 50,000 had been raised.
  5) He secretly reopened the site in October 2006 ( although he and fellow admin conspired to hide he was behind the reopening to the memebrs )
  6) When some members began to reappear in the forums, he went behind the backs of the admin staff and placed the site for sale on a domains website asking for " offers over $ 100,000 " and then published the traffic details of the site from 3 years earlier to show its worth (lol)
  
  None of this is new or secret and is all easily reachable via a google search - I'm surprised to see you didn't include some of this evidence in your article instead of making him out to be an innocent champion p2p crusader when in reality he was yet another p2p site owner abusing the members to make as many bucks as possible.

  14.2.2008 05:42 #3

• vertigone

  The donation money came to about $13,000 and was used for what it was said to be used for. He did actually sell the domain, and the person he sold it to is the one who put it up for sale, against Simon's wishes. Simon got the domain back and does have it now.
  
  I'm surprised to see you didn't take a moment to consider how little you really know and how unreliable a source the internet is instead of making him out to be "yet another p2p site owner abusing the members to make as many bucks as possible."

  14.2.2008 15:51 #4

• domie

  sorry but that is total crap - he never sold the domain - check it out at "who is" the inside dealings reports came from the ENTIRE admin of the site who posted the truth on their front page before quitting after they discovered what Simon Moon was up to and how he had betrayed them : Maxaiqa, Piratsvin etc posted it themselves - names ring a bell ? - you obviously didn't visit p2p forums very much if you didn't know all this already or hadn't seen it on the SR front page - hell it was posted all over the p2p world ! .
  
  here is a link for you to refresh your memory
  http://www.acfmovies.com/board/viewtopic.php?p=252828
  , I have 20 other identical links on other sites if you want to see more but here is he Share Reactor's chief admin ( Maxaiqa ) telling her story
  
  Quote:Well in short, we, the staff, got screwed over big time and that by a person we thought of as not just our boss but also our friend. We have defended him countless of times over the years from an endless abyss of rumers and badmouthing. All because we felt we knew a different side of him than the rest of you.
  It's very sad to see that we we're wrong. He really is a shit.
  2 months ago SimonMoon appeared out of the blue and told us to gather the gang, he wanted to revive SR, make it bigger and better than it ever was.
  He had so many plans and it all sounded too good to be true, we didn't really believe it would happen and the opening date got pushed a few times but then the day came, SR was back in business!
  With only 5 actively releasing team members (2 years ago we were around 15 I think) it was impossible to make SR what it used to be and with nothing going on in the forums building a new team seemed hopeless. But we tried our best with the time we had to spare, by we I mean the staff. Simon worked a little on the site, then slipped out and was seen less and less and the last month we haven't seen or heard from him at all.
  Not untill today. He pops back on IRC telling a a sob story how he was forced to do it this way. It's out of his hands.
  The sale was planned since the opening, he knew all along it would happen.
  HE DIDN'T TELL US A DAMN THING. Nothing. Zip. Nada.
  In fact he told us the opposite, he went on and on about all the plans for the future of SR. Made sure we would do our best to revive the site so he could sell it for a good price and give his staff the finger, both of them.
  In case you are confused, SR was never sold - there is no new owner, it's still SimonMoon behind the curtains. He didn't want anyone to know, so he went undercover as "BNDR."
  Or at least he is the owner for the next 7 days untill a new owner is found on sitepoint.
  I don't give shit for that "I selling for a friend" story.
  The worst really isn't that Simon completely screwed us over. We worked on the site because we had fun doing it.
  Our work is not wasted, more than 200.000 people have enjoyed our work and noone can take away the time well spent, the many hours we spent in the forums and on IRC, the many people we have gotten to know - it's a chapter in our lives and none of us will forget it.
  It ended bad the first time, but that was something we all knew could happen, we knew the risks. But this time...
  No, the worst about this whole charade is the way this site, our baby we have watched grow from zero to something noone would have dreamed of when it started out, is auctioned of by it's owner like it's an old pair of shoes. Like it doesn't matter, like he doesn't give a fuck who get's it and what happens to it.
  I can't think of a worse way to end the SR era than this.
  I told Simon he's a shit. I was so dissapointed, so agry, felt so fucked, so screwed and so like a fool that it was all I could master.
  His reaction was...
  "Fuck u all."
  And that is exactly what he has done...
  So let these be my last words to Simon; FUCK YOU TOO.
  /Maxaiqa
  and I have no idea how you can say the money was used for what it was intended when it was publically declared it was to buy a years contract with bandwidth for the SR site and the site was raided and taken offline before he could even set up a new contract. it was then down for almost 3 years before briefly re-emerging for 1 month before he tried to sell it again.
  
  I hope this clarifies things for you because you obviously have no idea of the truth
  
  - do a google search for yourself on "share reactor - simon moon - maxaiqa - domain for sale " etc etc and educate yourself a little

  14.2.2008 20:05 #5

• domie

  and the full version of his betrayal is on slyck.com
  
  http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=27396
  
  changed your mind yet ?

  14.2.2008 20:20 #6

• vertigone

  I know the guy. That beats anything else. I know the domain was transferred and that it was transferred back. I know the admins really believe their version, but that doesn't make it true. It looks like enough people said Simon was a villain that eventually those people who worked on SR with him (though not all) eventually started to believe that that was the truth too. Sorry, but I'm not going to be convinced. Reality is not the same as what you read on the internet.

  14.2.2008 20:46 #7

• vertigone

  The hosting for TheRealWorld was under that same internet line, so even after ShareReactor went down, the resources were still spent on the ed2k community, though not used to their full extent. He had already signed the contract with the new ISP when the site was taken down. He was contractually obligated to keep paying for the line even though it was not needed and there was no ad revenue whatsoever coming in from the site. I could go on and provide examples to show how financial motivations weren't the primary ones for SR, but the evidence isn't exactly conclusive in that direction. Suffice it to say that the financial situation of the site was not the best. Bills went unpaid, Chris' credit is not the best, and he's going to have to take out a loan to pay the court fees. 4000CHF might be the fine, but the total costs he's expected to pay are more like $15,000 US, and that's without any further civil suits.
  
  You don't even know this person, but you're so convinced you do and that he's as awful as everyone says. Sometimes the rumours really are wrong. I'm one of the ONLY people who knows the truth. Eventually you get sick of wasting your time trying to make people believe it.

  14.2.2008 20:53 #8

• borhan9

  Originally posted by ikari: A $5,000 court decision is not bad. I would pay it and be done with it. Better than millions and/or jail time.I would have to agree here this was a very light sentence and i would just pay it and be done with it and just let it go from then.

  8.4.2008 14:05 #9