More precisely, this was not the closure of Infostore but the seizure of its servers as part of an investigation, and the site stopped working while the equipment was in the hands of law enforcement. Eighteen servers, two storage systems and a switch were seized. The search lasted twelve hours, and it was not a raid of a few minutes but a long procedure with an inventory of every piece of hardware.
By then Infostore had come a long way. In December 2004, during the Orange Revolution, it was a site for citizen news, where readers themselves wrote the stories. By 2006 it had turned into a file-sharing service accessible through UA-IX, one of Ukraine's largest internet traffic exchange points. According to the owners, the service gathered up to five million users a month, and it was precisely this scale that made it noticeable to law enforcement.
The MIA's Version and the Owner's Response
Mykhailo Andriyenko, head of the MIA department for combating human trafficking, said that police in Belgium, France and Australia had sent more than a hundred requests about distributors of child pornography, and most of them concerned files on Infostore. According to his version, a letter to the site's management went unanswered for six months. These assertions belong to the prosecution, and in this article they are presented precisely as its position.
Oleksiy Mas, known in the internet community as the creator of Infostore, responded that the last time he had been at the department was at the end of August. According to him, the search warrant had been scanned on Infostore's own copier, and it cited materials that the company itself had handed over in August. He compared the scale of the service to communications infrastructure:
“This can be compared to a telephone network with a million and a half telephones.”
Public sentiment in the professional community was also tested by a poll. In his LiveJournal, Mas held a vote, and 54 percent of readers favored a collective appeal to the MIA. This is not a court decision or an official industry position, but the very fact of the poll shows that the internet community did not unconditionally side with the owner.
What the Law Says
Lawyer Mykhailo Honcharuk of the Dominion legal group explained the main distinction on which the whole story rests. A server, he said, is a platform for transmitting information, not a distributor. However, an owner who knew about the files and did not delete them may be deemed an accomplice. The line is drawn not by the fact that materials were present on the servers but by what the administration knew and what it did.
Adviser to the minister Kateryna Levchenko acknowledged that Ukrainian law in this area lags behind international law. The term “child pornography” does not exist in the law, and Article 301 describes the import, production, sale and distribution of pornographic items in the broad sense. That is why the case is classified under general formulations rather than a special norm on child protection.
A separate thread concerns Infostore's involvement in projects long associated with Mas. Together with Ruslan Dmytrakovych, he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network in January 1999, and in March 2000 he headed Ukrainsky Portal (UAPortal). In August 2008, when Mail.ua entered closed testing, its architect was the same Mas, and the project attracted more than one million dollars in investment from the Internet Invest group. Infostore's investor also included Oleksandr Olshansky, a board member of the Ukrainian Internet Companies Association (InAU), which held a press conference on the case on December 10. Ivan Petukhov, also a board member of InAU, was among those commenting on the situation.
As of December 12, the servers remained with the investigators, the site was not working, and the prosecutor's office continued its investigation under Article 301. The question of how the law would be applied to an owner who knew about the content and did not delete it remained open, and public comments on it were heard in different voices.
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