Coordinated effort in 14 countries carried out at the request of Belgian authorities. The investigation is two years in the making and is targeting individuals involved in “The Scene” file-sharing network as well as the servers copyrighted material was illegally uploaded to.
P2P is taking a big hit today with news that police across Europe are conducting one of the largest crackdown against illegal file-sharing ever to have taken place. This morning police in 14 European countries, including Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Britain, Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Italy, raided the homes of a number of individuals suspected of involvement as well as the ISPs that hosted servers where copyrighted material had been illegally uploaded to.
“I have not heard of any major crackdown in Europe in violation of copyright law,” said Paul Pinter, Sweden’s national coordinator for intellectual property crimes. “This is a huge crackdown.”
The raids were conducted at the behest of Belgian authorities who spent two years infiltrating a warez group known as “The Scene” which is composed of many layers. At the top are groups who compete with one another to obtain and upload copyrighted material to the Internet. The next layer of the network are so-called “Top-sites,” data severs where the copyrighted material is uploaded to made available.
A bulk of the raids appear to have been carried out in Sweden, long considered a file-sharing safe haven, and according to Swedish prosecutors, the raids there have mainly targeted “Top-sites.”
The Swedish Pirate Party “highly critical” of the raids being that one targeted the ISP hosting the servers of Wikileaks, the site currently embroiled in an international freedom of the press controversy.
“If it is found that the police have shut down Wikileaks newsroom,” says Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge, “the situation will go to a whole new level. When the Swedish authorities have gone all over the constitutional limits and the weight of American pressure to get rid of an uncomfortable newsroom. The situation is now very, very serious.”
Swedish Prosecutor Frederick Ingblad insists the raids have nothing to do about Wikileaks. He also notes the “special” nature of the investigation being that it involves “no investigation in Sweden, but it is a request for legal assistance from Belgium.”
“The seized material will probably be transferred to Belgium for investigation there,” added Ingblad. “We will then have to see what comes out of that, crimes could also have been committed in Sweden.”
Caught up in the mix seems to be Swedish BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay which is hosted by the same ISP as Wikileaks. As of now The Pirate Bay is down.
Stay tuned.
C’mon, guys, give Jared a break, he keeps the ball rolling and does his part.
It’s dubious whether TPB was down due to the raid or not, but we can safely assume that in general any attempt at taking down content from the web in digital form, thousands of completely unrelated sites will suffer also – although it appears that lately law enforcement are at least trying to be more precise.
Nevertheless, TPB presents a huge profile and will get caught in any net created by crude data mining of digital traffic profiling.
Which is not to say that the only sites which will later on have problems getting back on line are the ones who aren’t associated with the file sharing scene in any shape or form. These assorted witch hunts hurt honest joes alone and literally no one else in proportion to the damage they cause.
TPB was down? For how many minutes? XD
about 10. Someone stupidly installed some blocklists, which then blocked all access for TPB, who are on the list as they ‘have an interest in copyrighted things’, and work related to other entries on the list, like torrent, and the CCC…
the TPB downtime was completely unrelated to the bust. Come on Jared, a little checking would have told you that.
If u read the article I never said it was.
Wtf, what right do countries have to seize and then transfer the property of their citizens to other governments. well at least the pirate party just got a huge jump in membership. and there are a bunch of pissed off highly skilled technically inclined people who now have alot of free time. let the DoS attacks roll. this is a truely disgraceful waste of law enforcement resources
Anon delivers. It’s up and running. Shows how often I use TPB.
Its thepiratebay.org, not piratebay.org
yes, but both direct to the same place.
It’s shorthand.
It’s down for me.
from where I am looking there is no problems with thepiratebay.org and wikileaks.org are not down, so at least part of this report is nonsense
It’s strange how America is able to get these European countries to due its’ bidding.Or should I say Hollywood.
seems like there is a lot of topsites being busted