In June 2010, the very popular blogging platform site – blogetery.com disappeared under unexplainable circumstances. During the same period, ipbfree.com, another site that guided users to build message boards reportedly went offline. Both sites reported shutting down for good. Although, there is no connecting evidence for their recent online withdrawal, the reasons given for their current offline status are strangely similar, creating suspicious doubts in their public. Both sites also gave the same legal reasons maintaining that they were obliged to obey copyright law and that they also had the legal responsibility not to disclose any information in relation to their mysterious shut down.
Copyright violation or something else
The question on everyone’s mind now is ‘why’. It is true that many favorite services were taken down in recent years due to some copyright violation or other, but this was always happening at plain sight and after fierce court battles. Moreover, never at such close periods. Apparently, in the case of these two providers the situation is quite different.
From the shreds of information executives and employees reluctantly share, it became clear that both contained only user provided content. Despite this, both were shut down permanently. In addition, both platforms claim that this had something to do with copyright laws but they could not disclose more because whoever shut them down said they were legally bound to not do so.
An irreversible process
As users and officials are left pondering just what went on exactly, the only certain thing is that neither of the two platforms would ever return. In the words of one of iPBFree’s administrators – “all has disappeared without any chance of retrieval”. The same goes for Blogetery, whose executives described the service as “terminated”.
Here comes the interesting part. Apparently, the Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America have never heard of Blogetery and even if they had filed a complaint of any kind, this almost never results in a direct shut down. That would be an infringement of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which does not hold providers responsible for any copyright related posts of their users.
As for Ipbfree, the situation is quite similar. According to experts in cybercrime investigations, no agency in existence could possibly have the power of instant termination. Even the federals in child pornography related cases do not hold this power. None of this can be accomplished without some complicated legal manipulations.
It is true that the materials would probably be confiscated via search warrants and the IP addresses of downloaders and uploaders would be logged. However, all that would require time, while the service usually remains operational. In addition, in the US everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty.
That is why everyone is quite confident that something else is at play here. Exactly what that is remains a mystery. Meanwhile, we better stop and think about the contents we download/upload or in the case of providers – start making regular copies of the services.
