Filesoup founder faces file sharing charges

Posted on 5 Aug 2009 at 12:00

A UK man has been arrested for running Filesoup, an online forum for file sharers to exchange BitTorrent links.

Last week Avon and Somerset police raided the home of the man, identified only as Steve and his online moniker “Geeker”. He was taken into custody while officers seized phones, computers, hard drives, a video camera and other material from his house. He was later released on bail.

“I was arrested, and taken to the local police station, on the way I asked and was told that it would take about a couple of hours, when I arrived, the booking-in charge was entered as: Suspicion of downloading copyrighted movies,” Geeker wrote in an email .

“I was then interviewed by two police officers and it was recorded on tape, they asked loads of questions about all sorts of things to do with Filesoup, I had to correct and explain things to them several times, in very simple terms, a lot of the misconceptions or misunderstandings they had about the way BitTorrent works, how servers and hosts operate, how the internet works, what a domain name was, what a URL was, to name but a few things!”

Avon and Somerset police declined to comment. Its officers were accompanied by a representative of the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), which said it would not talk about an open investigation.

While the UK has seen nothing on the scale of the recent Pirate Bay case in Sweden, there have been successful prosecutions of people for running file sharing websites. Just last year four men, including site administrator Alan Ellis, were fined between £360 and £500 for copyright offences relating to the Oink website, following a police raid of Ellis’s home.

Author: Simon Aughton

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