1993: Founded in Sofia, Bulgaria Founder Veni Markovski chairman of Internet Society Bulgaria Hosts the web site of the Bulgarian President Operates numerous free file hosting sites, including an extensive company-owned archive of illegally copied music, and maintains two peer-to-peer (P2P) file-swapping servers Operates a customer-only server, offering pornographic images and movies collected from paid adult web sites

BOL.BG is one of the most prominent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Bulgaria. One of its founders, Veni Markovski, established the country's branch of Internet Society (ISOC). ISOC Bulgaria till today remains in a strong relationship with BOL.BG, having all of its board members involved with the ISP, in one way or another.

Over the years, the company has developed business connections with numerous political and state institutions, including several ministries and the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP). In addition, BOL.BG maintains the official web site of the Bulgarian President.

Yet, the Internet provider has not stayed behind in the area of file hosting. Several of its web sites -- mp3.bol.bg, mp3.portal.bg, video.bol.bg, free.bol.bg -- host thousands of music, movie and software files, most of which violate their authors' copyrights. On top of that, BOL.BG operates a server (samo-ot.bol.bg) available only to its customers, which stores large quantities of audio and video files and pornographic images and movies copied from paid adult web sites.

MP3.BOL.BG includes a huge archive, maintained by the company, of thousands of music files, among which motion picture soundtracks, compilations, jazz songs and hundreds of albums from top-selling artists. Recently, MP3.BOL.BG began offering its users the opportunity to contribute to the collection, uploading files of their choosing. In just the past few months, thousands of new MP3-encoded songs have been stored on the server.

The ISP uses the popularity of its file hosting to advertise its Internet access services and markets its samo-ot.bol.bg server as exclusive content, available only to its customers. Meanwhile, its hosting facilities remain rampantly unrestricted and encourage users to upload and download digital content protected by intellectual property laws and treaties. And like other similar free web hosting services in the country, BOL.BG limits accessibility to its file storage servers to Bulgarian users only.