The Interior Ministry of Ukraine has officially rejected reports in some Ukrainian media that the ex.ua file sharing service was allegedly blocked to please the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and not to combat Internet piracy.
"This information is untrustworthy," the head of the ministry’s public liaisons department, Volodymyr Polischuk, told Interfax-Ukraine on Feb. 4.
He said that "the ex.ua case is one of numerous criminal cases opened and investigated into by the police."
According to Polischuk, in 2011 law enforcers investigated into around 1,000 criminal cases against the violation of intellectual property rights, 600 of which were sent to court. He said that court rulings have been issued on 400 such cases.
He added that several dozens of Web sites that promoted violence, cruelty and xenophobia have been blocked since 2009.
On Feb. 4, some of Ukrainian media reported, with reference to a top official from the IMF, that the closure of the ex.ua service was a demonstrational action by the Ukrainian authorities following a visit by Ukrainian Finance Minister Valeriy Khoroshkovsky to the United States to hold negotiations on another IMF loan for Ukraine.
"If the police wanted to close piracy channels they would have done this starting with the Petrivka market [in Kyiv] and hundreds of other Web sites. But the U.S. has demanded the blocking of ex.ua for two years," the source said.
As reported, on Jan. 31, 2012 the Interior Ministry of Ukraine blocked the work of the ex.ua file sharing service, following which the Web sites of the ministry and other state agencies, including the president’s Web site, were attacked by hackers, which lead to full and partial blocking of work of these Web sites.
In the evening on Feb. 2, the Juscutum law firm, a legal representative of the ex.ua service, informed that it was trying to return the confiscated 200 servers with over 6,000 terabytes of information.
On Feb. 3, ex.ua resumed its work, but a significant part of its content is still unavailable.
