Interview with"Simon
Moon", webmaster and owner of ShareReactor.com
made
on the 20th of april 2004, by ImportantPeople.net (C)
please don't violate our copyrights by pasting this interview on your site,
thank you very much !
| ImportantPeople.net: | Simon, first of all (of course)
the question that's bugging over 250,000 people from all over the world: Why is Sharereactor.com after such a long and successful time offline ? |
| Simon Moon: | As it has been mentioned a
lot in several places in the last weeks - it is because of a lawsuit against me. I'm being accused of violating Article 67 of the copyright and article 61 of the trademark law in Switzerland. (The whole article, which is as precise as telling me I did something wrong with my car.) The examining magistrate seized the two main servers SR was running on, my private workstation, my girlfriends computer and all backups I had. They left me with no computer and no data this evening. Currently they are still examining the stuff and only a short time ago they took a first look at the servers. (after having them in their custody for more than five weeks) |
| ImportantPeople.net: | Is there a possibility that
the site will (perhaps in another form) reappear in the near or far future ? |
| Simon Moon: | If this examination proves
that it's legal to run a site like ShareReactor, which I assumed it to be and which every lawyer confirmed so far, ShareReactor will return. However, then it'll be using a new system which is nearly ready but which I'm not working on right now for obvious reasons since I don't know what to expect. |
| ImportantPeople.net: | How do you explain the site's
huge success, in the end it had over 250,000 daily visitors from all over the world. |
| Simon Moon: | A simple concept which allowed
easy access and enabled us to present the content in a professional way. Add to that the exceptional work from the admins, humble me preventing the hardware from dying under the load and you have a wonderful platform. The admins played the biggest part in the success since they created the content the users were seeking in the site. Considering that 25 people created content for 250,000 people you'll get an idea on the extreme relations. |
| ImportantPeople.net: | In retrospective - what are
your nicest and worst memories ? |
| Simon Moon: | There's no nicest memory,
just lots of great memories. I was positively shocked by the forum donations. We planned to run the thing and announce after a couple of days something like "We got $200 so it won't work that way so you'll have to be satisfied with what we have. We'll try to make the best of it." Well, I was pretty speechless then. The thing with Gowenna was bad. I don't want to stir that up again, others seem to love it but I think that's tasteless and disrespectful towards her person. |
| ImportantPeople.net: | Not only Sharereactor had
to close its doors, more and more ed2k pages had to shut down. Additionally, fileshares are facing lawsuits from the industry. What are your thoughts on this development ? |
| Simon Moon: | I'm lucky to live in Switzerland.
If I was in the US I'd be behind bars already and the key would be lost. That's the dilemma. What is legal here could be highly illegal in another country. In Germany I'm not allowed to copy my music CD to keep the original from damage or even a copy for my car. That's against the law. Here I can copy CDs, even 2 to 5 pieces and give it to my close friends. (fair use) Filesharing works the same way. In Canada you can upload and download music all you want, no joke! In Switzerland at least in theory it's not punishable to download something through the internet. That's how things developed. Napster wasn't the first P2P application, only the first to become famous. These days there's lots of crap. i.e. Kazaa. Proprietary systems like Napster and Kazaa don't stand a chance, they inhibited development and desperately tried to commercialize it. Projects like eMule, mlDonkey, Gnutella, etc. have a better Chance to grow since they structures are different and open for extensions. |
| ImportantPeople.net: | Will P2P be able to prevail
in it's current form or will the industry and governments have their way ? |
| Simon Moon: | It's the same problem with
IRC and FTP. Is IRC illegal ? Is FTP illegal ? No, they're technologies. P2P networks are technologies. I'm still waiting for huge companies to take advantage of it and offer the latest game files thtough the network. Or trailers, etc. And even if that doesn't happen, how can you prohibit a technology ? You'd have to shut down all PCs. Only huge mainframes with dumb workstations would be ok then. P2P is changing all the time and keeping up isn't something that politics and their prosecutors can afford and the industry can't cope with it since it happens too fast. |
| ImportantPeople.net: | Do you see a future for 'legal'
download or filesharing services of copyrighted material ? Could this even win over the traditional fee-of-charge filesharing these days ? |
| Simon Moon: | If you buy a movie, let's
say the Matrix Revolutions DVD, you pay 19.95 euros via Amazon.de. Without the chance to actually see something beforehand, no previews. if you could download parts of the movie, like 10 minutes and watch them and decide what to buy, you'd be watching a lot less movies but only those that you like and gladly pay for. If you buy a DVD lots of money goes into packaging and trade. Scratch that, add the necessary bandwidth und for the same product in digital form you'd pay 4 to 5 euros and the companies would still profit plenty from it. Of course you should be able to watch and copy it as often as you like. Same with other things like music, books, games. PC Games are a good role model with demo verisions. Will the free filesharing networks disappear ? No. But I know there's a LOT of people out there willing to pay for a service that gives the high quality benefits for a reasonable price. 99 cent for one song ? Ridiculous. |
| ImportantPeople.net: | Besides eDonkey there's another
popular filsharing application, namely „BitTorrent“ which is faster for getting current movies, games and software. What are your thought on that compared to edonkey/emule ? |
| Simon Moon: | Bittorrent is a P2P technology,
not really a file exchange community. Kazaa, eDonkey, Gnutella, those are filesharing communities since you log into a global network and get in touch with all the other people in that network. There might be nserver, supernodes and more but you can access all of them. It's different with Bittorrent. Bram Cohen, the creator simply wanted to distribute a file as fast as possible to as many places as possible. He did that with P2P technology. A download is created as a torrent file. A person get this file and starts downloading it by connecting to a server that coordinates downloads and tries to get files to you as fast as possible. This server is good and bad. Kill the server and your torrent is worth crap. Kill an ed2k server and everything still works. You might also have incomplete torrents. Without a sophisticated client you won't notice while it's pretty obvious in ed2k. The biggest problem is your personal safety. It's extremely easy to discover who started the torrent, you can get statistics from any IP. It wouldn't surprise me if some US feds are using Torrent Trackers to find who is downloadng what. Even the BitTorrent creator put it plainly: BT is not for distributing illegal content, technically it's the worst choice for such things. BT is nice. If you don't happen to live in the US or similar countries it's a fine source for brand new stuff. That another disadvantage - you won't find old stuff in the network, sometime not even the tracker. |
| ImportantPeople.net: | Apart from the successful
webmaster Simon Moon there is the human Simon Moon in Real Life. Want to share some activities/hobbies in RL ? |
| Simon Moon: | No. I like my privacy and
my life is not onlone. I live in RL. I do lots of things online since that's my interest, it's my hobby. What i do in RL is nobody's business. :) |
| ImportantPeople.net: | In closing a little forecast
from an internet expert. What will the internet be in the 4 or 5 or perhaps 10 years ? |
| Simon Moon: | I'll buy the internet and
rule the world! No, no idea. The last 5 years weren't that great. (think the year when Matrix 1 was released until now) Before that there was more going on but apart form that pretty dull. I think that in the next 10 years several things will happen. Among others I keeping my hopes up vor IPv6 which will bring plenty of IP addresses for everbody. The networking will evolve further, mobile phone -> internet will grow and become easier but other things like WLAN will be huge. Networking toasters and fridges are interesting combinations as well as with the water meter, the doorbell, light switches. etc You can control your house using your computer or have it supervised by your computer to save energy. Things like these have a lot of potential but are still very immature. The other direction will be online games like MMORPGS. They're getting more and more popular. There will be less single player games and more internet games. In 2 to 4 years we can expect a revolution in this field. |
| ImportantPeople.net: | Simon Moon, thanks you for the interview! |
Big tnx to Vincent Venus (FreeReactor.com) for this nice translation from german into english !