Effort against movie piracy results in major bust


For the past several months we've been assisting to what RIAA and MPAA like to call the big busts, because of their impact on the movie piracy scene. Media represents this as yet another huge step against piracy, with press-releases popping up everywhere. Another german organization, GVU (something like the German Federation Against Copyright Theft) wants to be just like the big corporations. Slyck is reporting that earlier this morning, several top warez providers were shut down by the local police and the enternainment industry. Over 30 individuals were arrested, more then 20 servers, with FTP access, and 28 hard drives (over 4 Terabytes) were seized. The raids took place in Germany, Austria, Holland, Poland and the Czech Republic. 

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According to the police, the groups RELOADED, KNIGHTS, TFCiSO and many more were eliminated, and the leader of RELOADED was arrested during the raids. None of these was confirmed by GVU nor can be confirmed by CD Freaks.

The raids also yielded over 20 servers, which provided FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access to individuals belonging to the release groups. GVU claims the warez groups were responsible for the proliferation "of illegal copies of films, computer games, music and user software." The enforcement raids were the culmination of the GVU's investigative efforts, with legal follow-through provided by the prosecutor's offices in Duesseldorf and Frankfurt.

Rumors of the bust began circulating online today, as members attempted to warn each other. According to warning notices online, the following top providers have, for all intents and purposes, been eliminated; RELOADED, KNIGHTS, TFCiSO, Cinemaniacs, German-Friend, ParadieseBeach and Klapsmuehle. In addition, the leader of RELOADED was reported as arrested during the raids. It should be noted however, the GVU has not confirmed the closure or arrest of anyone associated with RELOADED.

The pursuit of top providers is a primary concern to the entertainment industry, as the proliferation of pirated material often begins with these organizations. From these FTP sources, pirated material (especially movies) trickle down to the Newsgroups, IRC, BitTorrent and finally P2P networks. Initially, these raids may place a damper on spread of pirated material, however the allure of public recognition is simply too great for many to avoid. With time, their role in the online warez community will most likely be replaced. 

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These raids are growing fastly in Europe, with thousand
of copyrighted material and computer material being seized. The question is, how
effective are they? We've seen a lot of these in 2005 and 2006 doesn't seem to
be going slowly when it comes to piracy. P2P continues strong and new
alternatives are arising fastly. When one group is eliminated, two or more are
created, and this cycle seems to never end, only tends to get bigger. When will
this stop?

Source: Slyck

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