On the heels of the news that France is formally mulling a three strike policy for online users, one of the French movie scene releasers was busted.

The French news site 01Net reported the news (French – English Google translation) recently.

According to the report, the arrests came when French anti-piracy outfit ALPA (Association against audiovisual piracy) made a complaint. The people that were arrested, judging by the report, were the site-ops for the group. The report also says that CineFox was the first group to release French version of X-Men 3, Jumper, 10,000 BC and Mission Impossible 3.

From the report (As translated by Charles Eddy, a ZeroPaid reader)

“This is a real case of an organized group that has global branches” he adds. Dozens of servers in France, linked to the Netherlands, contain thousands of gigabytes of counterfeit. “The group is far from being film collectors or novelty-seekers. The main purpose of these groups is clearly money. An investigator said that without [the groups], the forums and boards (such as Oleoo, which was closed by the same service, NDLR, some time ago) wouldn’t exist.”

This whole illegal underground culture generates money . . . and makes for vicious fights between the different sides [of the pirating battle]. The competition seems to be merciless on the Internet. “The Warez scene is corrupted by money with an obvious starting point, which is part of it. There are a lot of dirty tricks, and here is more proof.”

Cinefox would essentially be shut down because of a document which was circulated by a competitor in August, 2007, a text file that revealed information on counterfeiters: the servers, IP addresses, and screen names behind the pirates and their accomplices. A precious document for investigators, who could now track down the leaders of the group: not a simple task, otherwise.

“They could always catch two or three,” explains a Warez member, “but today it’s becoming more and more complicated to find us. We lease servers overseas – in Estonia, in the U.S. with “layered” hosting, or in the Czech Republic – the information is hidden on different servers. It’s encrypted. Our connections are encrypted with SSL.”

The report also suggests that another scene release group known as Carnage have quit the scene as a result of the recent bust.

Update: Proper translations by Charles Eddy inserted. Thanks Charles for working on this particular translation!

Operation Site Down is said to be one of the biggest anti-piracy efforts ever conducted. The raids took place in June of 2005. According to a Department of Justice press release, the raids resulted in a total of 40 convictions.

The raid is said to have affected groups like RiSCISO, Myth, HOODLUM, VENGEANCE, Centropy, Corrupt, GAMERZ, ADMITONE and several others. No doubt, this marked a very dark time in scene history. It seems that, at least for one, things are about to continue to be dark times.

David M. Fish is said to have scripted a scene site and uploaded/downloaded over 500 copyrighted works. Recently, he was sentenced to 30 months in prison followed up by 3 years of supervision after release as well as a $500 mandatory assessment.

The press release continues:

On Feb. 27, 2006, Fish pleaded guilty to five counts in federal court in San Jose, including four counts in the Northern District of California case for conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement; distribution of technology primarily designed to circumvent encryption technology protecting a right of a copyright owner and aiding and abetting; circumventing a technological measure that protects a copyright work and aiding and abetting; copyright infringement by electronic means and aiding and abetting. On the same day, Fish also pleaded guilty to one count of criminal infringement of a copyright in the Southern District of Iowa. The two cases involved separate investigations and conduct in both jurisdictions. The charges were consolidated and prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California.

Scripters for warez sites create, program and help build the sites. Suppliers provide an unauthorized copyrighted movie, game or software while equipment suppliers provide hardware (such as hard drives, computer parts, and computer servers) to the warez site. Brokers find groups to participate on the warez site and encoders circumvent the technological measures and protections of copyrighted works on the DVDs designed to prevent unauthorized access and copying.

In the Southern District of Iowa case, Fish participated in a separate warez site from Jan. 21, 2003, through April 21, 2004. The warez server used in this case was determined to contain approximately 13,000 pirated software titles including movies, games, utility software and music. Transfer logs confirm that defendant Fish assisted in the uploading of 131 software titles and downloading 373 software titles to and from the warez FTP server between Aug. 16, 2003, and March 29, 2004. The Iowa case resulted from an earlier national initiative against online piracy known as Operation FastLink.

Via Information Week

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