The Interior Ministry of Ukraine has said that law enforcers and copyright holders had warned the administration of the ex.ua online service about its illegal activities several times and a criminal case on violation of copyrights and neighboring rights was opened against the service on July 1, 2011.
"Frankly speaking, I don’t understand yesterday’s reaction to these events. The case has been under investigation for half a year. A number of investigative actions have been carried out. In fact, law enforcers, the government of Ukraine and copyright holders warned the management of the ex.ua resource about their illegal actions several times. That is why I can’t say that it was a planned action against the resource and Ukrainian citizens," Deputy Head of the Department for Fight against Cybercrimes of the Interior Ministry of Ukraine Ruslan Pakhomov said during a press conference in Kyiv on Wednesday.
He stressed that servers and equipment of the ex.ua company were withdrawn during the search of the company’s office. All equipment was passed for examinations to check what information was stored there and to evaluate the damage caused to copyright holders.
Pakhomov also said that employees of the company were interrogated, but no one was detained.
He added that the criminal case was opened upon an address of copyright holders, including Adobe, Graphisoft and Channel 1+1.
Pakhomov added that Microsoft also made complaints against the ex.ua service. To a statement, according to which Microsoft declined such information, he said: "Well, probably they denied it."
The officials also rejected reports in some media that the Volia company was allegedly involved into the case.
As reported, on Jan. 31, 2012, Ukrainian police officers stopped the activity of well-known file hosting service ех.ua for alleged violations of intellectual property rights. The Ukrainian Interior Ministry reported that some 200 servers with a total volume of illegal content over 6,000 terabytes were seized during searches conducted at the office and data centers of the online file storage provider.
The service’s representative, Yuris Piskovoy, did not confirm reports of the seizure of its servers by law-enforcement bodies but did report the suspension of its domain name delegation.
