WARSAW (Reuters) – Polish police have broken up a gang of more than 100 hackers who sold pirated music and films, using academic computer systems around the world to store their wares, a police spokeswoman said on Tuesday.
“They broke into the biggest systems they could find and set up ‘warehouses’ to store pirated games, films and music,” police spokeswoman Agata Salatka said of one of Poland’s biggest piracy-related busts.
“They distributed the goods through the Internet, and also supplied bazaars with the latest hits — even before their official premieres,” she said, adding that the group may also have copied and sold academic theses from the host computers. Poland has won praise from anti-piracy groups for improving copyright laws and beefing up enforcement against the piracy that flourished in the mid-1990s, but illegal copies of films and music are still available at bazaars in most large cities.
International police and intellectual-property experts say eastern European manufacturing centers are notorious for contributing to the estimated $29 billion in worldwide pirate software trade in 2003.
Salatka added that police had detained the group’s ringleaders but would not say how many there were, saying only that evidence had been gathered against more than 100 people.
She said all the suspects were over 18, but they included many secondary-school students and the vast majority were around 20 years old.
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