Bulgarian Internet service providers and music, film, and software server owners are gearing up for a crackdown on online piracy.
The ISPs and server owners said March 28 that they were working on a strategy to start taking the illegal files offline within the next ten days, according to eastern European media reports.
The companies have been pressed by Bulgaria's government to come up with ways to get pirated software, music, and movies offline. But like many of their counterparts in the United States and elsewhere in Europe, the ISPs have been quoted as saying the piracy culprits are the users who commit the piracy and not the ISPs or servers through whom they move the materials.
"The strict measures aimed to limit Internet piracy of intellectual property are quite unlikely to uproot that practice, experts say," according to a report from the Sofia News Agency. "They believe there is already a well-functioning substitute in the face of peer-to-peer networks that allow exchange of files through computer networks, rather than downloading them from the Internet."
Bulgaria reportedly would like to change the country's reputation as a hotbed for electronic piracy. "If you need free music, movies, games or PC software," Sofia computer lover Ivan Tenev told a reporter for Svetlozar, a Bulgarian publication, in 2003, "come to Bulgaria."
The publication said in the same story that Bulgaria's "microcosm (of) Internet space" offers unrestricted, cost-free, high-speed access "to gargantuan piles of easy-to-find audio, video, and software files." It said one of the country's highest-profile ISPs, ProLink, launched free Web hosting for Bulgarian Netizens only, "but its users quickly understood the service's true potential was not in hosting small personal Websites."
