Interested in starting file sharing site

I was interested in starting a file sharing site but I had some questions. First the site is for usenet and I plan to only allow references to where you can find the content through nzb indexing sites like nzbindex.nl. I was thinking of hosting it in the netherlands since this seems to be the place where I'll have the least amount of issues. I was wondering if there's anything I'm missing? I was also wondering is it illegal to index content if you don't provide direct access to the content? For example all the file sharing sites that provide links to files on hotfile, filesonic, etc.

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I was thinking of hosting it in the netherlands since this seems to be the place where I'll have the least amount of issues. I was wondering if there's anything I'm missing? I was also wondering is it illegal to index content if you don't provide direct access to the content?

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Netherlands have had their fair share of court cases, especially when it comes to newzbins or usenets or whatever the fook it's called - one I recall instantly was the direct hoster of the content being successfully sued. Im not sure to what extent the legality of indirectly hosting content is, but UK sites have been prosecuted before, notably TVlinks. IMO you're in the same boat as every other warez board or torrent site out there.

Go for a Spanish host - P2P, for now atleast, is a legitimate activity there, and it seems like most other spanish speaking nations couldn't give a fly f*ck about P2P either.
Get domain/whois privacy.
Install truecrypt [shouldn't impact much, just make sure you have a decent amount of processing power to begin with] and in the event your server is confiscated, they should have nothing on you.

Disclaimer: Im not a lawyer, just a kid with too much time on his hands.

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Originally Posted by TONiC

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I was thinking of hosting it in the netherlands since this seems to be the place where I'll have the least amount of issues. I was wondering if there's anything I'm missing? I was also wondering is it illegal to index content if you don't provide direct access to the content?

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Netherlands have had their fair share of court cases, especially when it comes to newzbins or usenets or whatever the fook it's called - one I recall instantly was the direct hoster of the content being successfully sued. Im not sure to what extent the legality of indirectly hosting content is, but UK sites have been prosecuted before, notably TVlinks. IMO you're in the same boat as every other warez board or torrent site out there.

Go for a Spanish host - P2P, for now atleast, is a legitimate activity there, and it seems like most other spanish speaking nations couldn't give a fly f*ck about P2P either.
Get domain/whois privacy.
Install truecrypt [shouldn't impact much, just make sure you have a decent amount of processing power to begin with] and in the event your server is confiscated, they should have nothing on you.

Disclaimer: Im not a lawyer, just a kid with too much time on his hands.

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Basically, usenet is like hotfile, rapidshare, etc. in that users upload content to a server and others can download said content. Unlike hotfile and rapidshare though the content is universal between all usenet providers. For example, I use astraweb and if I upload my content there it gets synced to giganews (another company). Giganews content is also synced with astraweb so everyone can get everything. There are a lot of providers. Each provider typically offers different features for the cost. I pay $96 a year and get SSL (so I'm encrypted) and have 950 day+ (and growing) retention. Once uploaded content on Usenet is very hard to take down (unlike hotfile or rapidshare) because of it's design. It's extremely secure and vastly superior to hotfile, etc. Plus files almost always complete at top internet speed and we have recovery files in case of damage. You download an NZB file (like a torrent) and that's it. You find NZB files through indexing sites like newsbin or nzbmatrix (both are very nice). To download from usenet you need a usenet download client like sabnzbd. This also handles extraction and will repair damaged downloads. If you haven't tried it, it's seriously worth the money especially because it's the safest way to download out there where as torrents are probably the least secure. Everything is encrypted (so your ISP can't snoop on you) and your IP isn't exposed to anyone except the place you find the content and your provider.

Thanks for the info though I'll take it under advisement.

I believe Ecatel is the only Dutch host who still actively gives BREIN the finger. Santrex resells them.

Russian and Ukrainian hosts are also "safe". wjunction.com is the official home of "warez webmasters" - just keep out of the Marketplace if you don't want to get scammed.

protip: Look for hosts/domain registrars who offer real whois privacy and accept Liberty Reserve ("anonymous" payments ;)). Oh and don't even consider a com/net/org domain and obvously stay miles away from US companies.

Edit: fuck, that post looks like beck38 had written it because of all those quotation marks.

Good info I'll keep it on record and implement it when I'm ready to go live.

The Netherland's file-sharing sites used to be safe, until Hollywood started shoveling money into BREIN. The best places to host at are probably countries that do not - yet - have Hollywood's minions firmly established in the government and/or police.

Being on the right side of the law - at least technically - can make little difference when it comes to staying out of the copyright cartel's crosshairs. Just look what happened to Torrent-Finder, a pass-through search-engine-of-search-engines that under even the strictest interpretation of copyright law was committing no offense.

My top picks would probably be North Korea, Cuba, and Libya - countries that are unlikely to bend over when Hollywood comes knocking.

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North Korea, Cuba, and Libya

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I think you've also just managed to name the top 3 least likliest countries to get hosting in... especially North Korea. You're right in that, when hosting a warez site, you'd probably want to host in a country that will not back down to these [russian accent]capitalist dogs[/russian accent], but they are unsuitable largely because they don't have the infrastructure - one is the most closed coutnry in the world, the other an island [speaks for itself], the other is in africa [again speaks for itself]. As I said, Spain is safe for now at least, after that my choice would be eastern europe.

@TONiC

regarding Spain, I still remember Spanishare, an edonkey site which I believe was the very first P2P site busted by police, and that was almost 10 years ago.

In the last year or two, Spanish courts have indeed ruled very favorably for file-sharing. However, because of this, Spain is now a country in the spotlight as the most P2P-friendly country in Europe, and the RIAA, MPAA, and their bought-and-paid-for friends in Washington are pressing hard for tough new anti-P2P laws in Spain.

Just like Russia (where a court awarded allofmp3 the stamp of legality, before WTO threats forced a reversal) I don't expect the party in Spain to last forever. Probably the best defense is to be a moving target, always staying one step ahead of the authorities. It also doesn't hurt to have a site's front-end (proxy) and back-end in different countries, and with backup hosts lined up just in case.

The Pirate Bay might serve as a good example to follow. It seems it's not known who currently owns and runs the site, or even where the (back-end) servers are located. Despite being Enemy #1. :)

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In the last year or two, Spanish courts have indeed ruled very favorably for file-sharing. However, because of this, Spain is now a country in the spotlight as the most P2P-friendly country in Europe, and the RIAA, MPAA, and their bought-and-paid-for friends in Washington are pressing hard for tough new anti-P2P laws in Spain.

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They're pressing hard but they won't get it. Spanish sites are very well organised, ie, going down on mass to draw attention for the cause and rally against 21st century US imperialism. Spain is very pro-civil liberties anyway: they spawned Holland for fXck sake, anarchism is still rife today, the right to grow cannabis is in their constitution, and they've legalised holocaust denial because legislating "denial" was unconstitutional. Trust me, Spain don't give a fxck and won't give a fxck, and if they ever do from a government perspective, then hell will break loose.

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Originally Posted by TONiC

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In the last year or two, Spanish courts have indeed ruled very favorably for file-sharing. However, because of this, Spain is now a country in the spotlight as the most P2P-friendly country in Europe, and the RIAA, MPAA, and their bought-and-paid-for friends in Washington are pressing hard for tough new anti-P2P laws in Spain.

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They're pressing hard but they won't get it. Spanish sites are very well organised, ie, going down on mass to draw attention for the cause and rally against 21st century US imperialism. Spain is very pro-civil liberties anyway: they spawned Holland for fXck sake, anarchism is still rife today, the right to grow cannabis is in their constitution, and they've legalised holocaust denial because legislating "denial" was unconstitutional. Trust me, Spain don't give a fxck and won't give a fxck, and if they ever do from a government perspective, then hell will break loose.

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Well, TPB got kicked off by their Spanish provider (can't remember which one) after the cyberpunker folks ditched them because of some legal heat by the MPAA.

Nowadays they're run by the legal and registered Swedish political party Piratpartiet. Tracert shows that they are currently running a proxy node in Germany, nobody knows where the databases and shit are geographically located.

Demonoid has has an Ukrainian host for quite some time because they block all domestic traffic + pr0n torrents so they're within the law I believe.

Basically it all comes to how much the provider is willing to fight back when shit hits the fan. Most hosts think it's far more economical to just shut down the "infringing" site.

If I were you I would probably pull Demonoid and host it on a dedicated server/colo in Ukraine.

zot: as TONiC mentioned, are you familiar with the infrastructure in Cuba, and the government's stance on Internet-related matters? For me, that country is out of the question.

About Spain not giving a fuck, what's up with the Sinde law?

If we're talking about safe havens here, I'm surprised no one mentioned my region (South America) yet. The infrastructure is "OK" and slowly improving, but for the time being no one seems to care about piracy sites. The company that hosts Taringa (probably the biggest local link sharing community) actually mentions how they're proud of doing that and therefore proving the extent of their fast and reliable hosting on their homepage. 'Nuff said...

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Originally Posted by anon-sbi

About Spain not giving a fuck, what's up with the Sinde law?

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Wikileaks exposed Sinde law as the America-rules-the-world legislation that it was, and ultimately it did not pass, and shall not pass [quote: Gandalf]. And I did say "other spanish speaking nations" before :P You guys sure do love your ED2K over there..

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Originally Posted by TONiC

And I did say "other spanish speaking nations" before :P

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Yes, that's correct. I retire what I said, sorry :)

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You guys sure do love your ED2K over there..

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That's in Spain, as far as I know - they're true eD2K fans. The eMule userbase where I live isn't that big. People prefer to just stream everything and get what they want off file hosters these days. Ares reigned some years back because of its simplicity, content and speeds - you practically couldn't find an Internet-connected computer without that installed and running. Now those days are gone :idunno:

I was looking at corenetworks.net. $30 for a starter dedicated might be all I need. However, they don't seem to accept libertyreserve. Frankly what I'm thinking of is a CentOS or Debian system (comfortable with both and both are very stable) using TrueCrypt to encrypt the system. I would like to get libertyreserve to handle transactions and use a pre-paid credit card to pay them. Plus only login to their site while using Tor proxy. Host it some where safe like Spain (for now) and get whois protection. That with indirect links, I think would offer pretty good protection, plus if I do ever get nailed I should be as anonymous as realistically possible. I don't see any holes in my logic does anyone else? Does anyone know of any cheap dedicated servers that support libertyreserve?

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Originally Posted by mydark

I was looking at corenetworks.net. $30 for a starter dedicated might be all I need. However, they don't seem to accept libertyreserve. Frankly what I'm thinking of is a CentOS or Debian system (comfortable with both and both are very stable) using TrueCrypt to encrypt the system. I would like to get libertyreserve to handle transactions and use a pre-paid credit card to pay them. Plus only login to their site while using Tor proxy. Host it some where safe like Spain (for now) and get whois protection. That with indirect links, I think would offer pretty good protection, plus if I do ever get nailed I should be as anonymous as realistically possible. I don't see any holes in my logic does anyone else? Does anyone know of any cheap dedicated servers that support libertyreserve?

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You forgot the most important part: Do not host it in the US of A.

The countries that i would host in if i were you, would be USA, UK, Australia, or Germany. Those are certainly the safest havens to host filesharing sites in.

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Originally Posted by Vorx

The countries that i would host in if i were you, would be USA, UK, Australia, or Germany. Those are certainly the safest havens to host filesharing sites in.

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You're doing fine, but you could use a few more rounds on Trolling 101.

i would also give out the IP lists, and personal information of all of my users,to the MPAA, RIAA, BRIEN, etc.

Does anyone know how corenetworks.net treats copyright claims?

A lot of hosting providers are easily intimidated by threats and will immediately shut down a site at the first accusation, but a rare few have had the courage to stand up in the name of internet freedom. The Dutch host Leaseweb earned a reputation for standing up to the copyright cartel (and got a lot of torrent site business for awhile) but even they eventually folded from all the pressure. PRQ (of Pirate Bay fame) also had its time in the spotlight.

The main question is whether you want to try your luck as a pioneer or play it safe and stay in known friendly territory.

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Originally Posted by zot

Does anyone know how corenetworks.net treats copyright claims?

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Seems like they are based in Michigan going by their contact address and a whois trace, so probably along the lines of the DMCA...

cool

Is it possible to be secure with a virtual server or do you need a dedicated server? For example, let's say I looked for a server in Spain (or wherever it might be relatively safe currently) and just encrypt the web server contents and DB. As long as I pay them anonymously and don't give them any personal info I would think I'm safe (especially if I only remote in for administration using a proxy). I also don't think I would need to worry about my users considering all people are doing is browsing/updating the index. Nobody is downloading anything, so any IP information would just show people are on the site, it wouldn't show anything about what they are doing. I have no idea how much bandwidth would be used per month so the cost of a dedicated I think would be severe overkill.

Don't be retarded; get a dedi.