EarthStation 5
Earth Station 5 was notable for its strong, if overstated, emphasis on user anonymity, and for its bold advocacy of piracy and copyright infringement.
ES5's highly antagonistic position toward copyright advocacy and enforcement organizations garnered the group significant attention and peaked with an ES5 press release announcing a "declaration of war" against the Motion Picture Association of America.
ES5 claimed to operate out of the Jenin in the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank, a region where they argued that copyright laws were unenforceable.
[1] People associated with ES5 claimed in media reports that the network had more than 16,000,000 participants at its peak,[2][3] but these numbers were unsupported and viewed very skeptically.
However, users still felt overwhelmed by the "bundled" features that included a dating service and audio-visual chat.
"[7] Even many participating in or sympathetic to the file-sharing community were skeptical, believing that anonymous communication on P2P networks was technically impossible without critically compromising quality of service, and as a result they considered ES5's claims to be snake oil.
[1] However, none of these layers of security prevented RIAA member companies from detecting and gathering information about ES5 users' file trading activities.
In later versions of its client, ES5 added the ability to use a network of proxies to obscure the source of requests or shared files.
[5] ES5 also added the ability to "spoof" IP addresses in a way that ES5 claimed made it more difficult to track down file sharers.
[citation needed] After the ruling in A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., which held Napster liable for contributory infringement by its users,[10][11] most P2P networks were careful to adopt a strategy of "turning a blind eye" to copyright infringement on their network in order to escape or minimize liability.
[citation needed] This step was important in assuring that ES5's network could offer a sufficient amount of content to users.
In the early stages of the network, ES5 tried to attract users by streaming movies in addition to in-network sharing.
This position culminated in a famous press release where ES5 formally declared war on the MPAA: In the same release, ES5 claimed that, "unlike Kazaa and other P2P programs who subsequently deny building their P2P program for illegal file-sharing, ES5 is the only P2P application and portal to actually join its users in doing P2P.
[citation needed] ES5 had claimed that the encryption around its system made identifying and blocking traffic from the site impossible.
But as the apparently secretive and untruthful acts of ES5 came to light, the core fan base began to rebel in the main ES5 forum, leading to many users being banned and topics being deleted.
[citation needed] The ES5 website and forums were taken offline permanently and are today only accessible through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
