A resource without an office
Infostore began as a citizen-journalism site during the 2004 Orange Revolution. By 2006 it had become a file-sharing service accessible through the Ukrainian internet exchange point UA-IX. The search conducted by the Interior Ministry on 4 and 5 December 2008 lasted 12 hours: 18 servers, two storage systems and a switch were seized.
The project has no office of its own, according to Mas. Infostore consists of software, providers and hosting companies, and the number of active users, by his estimate, is one and a half million. There were no complaints about music or films. The company, Mas said, was in talks with the Motion Picture Association, the largest trade association of Hollywood studios, and its director of anti-piracy came to visit them. Abroad, the resource was available only for photographs.
The claim that no charges were brought contradicts his own comment published on 5 December. In the Detector Media interview, Mas explained only that the servers were seized as part of an investigative experiment. The question of commerce had been raised before. The earliest indication of it is a reader's comment under a December article about the accrual of "energy" that could be converted into electronic money. This is the opinion of an anonymous author, not an established fact.
What the creator says
The interview was published in Ukrainian. Mas insisted on his main thesis: according to him, the project was never conceived as a source of income.
"Infostore was generally a non-commercial project"
Help, according to Mas, was offered by many, including the Communist Party of Ukraine. He expressed confidence in the resource's future:
"I think we will restore the resource. There is even certainty"
The prosecution in the case was represented by Mikhail Andriyenko, head of the Interior Ministry's department for combating human trafficking. In December publications about the case, comments were made by Ivan Petukhov, a board member of the Internet Association of Ukraine, Mikhail Goncharuk, owner of the publication Dominion, and Kateryna Levchenko, adviser to the Minister of the Interior. Alexander Olshansky, a board member of the Internet Association of Ukraine, was named as an investor in Infostore.
Parallel projects
In the same months, Mas was working on other projects. In March 2008, in an interview, he spoke about the Ukrainian Banner Network, which showed 36 million impressions per day. Another of his ventures was Mail.ua, of which he was the architect. On 22 August 2008, the mail service was launched in closed testing, and the group Internet Invest, which had invested more than $1 million in the project, became its main investor.
Mas himself began his path on the internet with UBS. Together with Ruslan Dmitrakovich, he launched the network in January 1999: by his recollection, it took three weeks of work in Perl, and expenses amounted to about $100. A year later, on 7 March 2000, he became director of the Ukrainian Portal (UAPortal).
On 1 April 2009, the first Ukrainian Internet Professionals Forum, the future iForum, was held in Kyiv, gathering 1,280 participants for the tenth anniversary of UBS. In 2010, in an interview, Mas presented himself as the creator of Infostore, that is, he continued to consider the resource his project, despite the search and seizure of servers in December 2008.
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