Acting at the prodding of a U.S. movie industry suit against computer servers that enable file swapping, Dutch authorities have raided a pair of popular Web sites offering links to eDonkey.
Eight people were arrested and 11 servers seized in the Dutch raids, which added on to similar raids against servers in Finland and France and a Motion Picture Association of America announcement that they would sue those operating file-swapping servers for eDonkey, BitTorrent, and Direct Connect.
Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN and the government's Economic Inspection Service of the Fiscal Intelligence and Investigation Service said the two sites hit in the Dutch raids claimed about 50,000 registered users. BREIN said they plan to press charges against the server operators and Dutch hosting provider Mindlab in the case.
The MPAA said December 14 they would pursue the server operators. “The operators of these servers exercise total control over which files are included on their servers and even determine if some kinds of files aren’t allowed,” said a statement from John Malcolm, MPAA senior vice president for world anti-piracy operations.
“For instance, some operators won’t post pornography on their systems, but they have no compunction allowing illegal files of copyrighted movies and TV shows to flow through their servers," he continued. "We are moving to stop that. The message today is clear: if you illegally trade movies online, we can find you and we will hold you accountable.”
The new MPAA president, Dan Glickman, agreed. “We cannot just sit back and let Internet pirates brazenly steal our movies and other intellectual property,” he said in his own statement, saying the actions against the server operators "not only will protect creativity but also will bolster the nascent legitimate online market for motion picture distribution. The film industry believes digital delivery of entertainment holds great promise, if we can protect it from thieves long enough to give it a chance to grow. Our member companies are developing and supporting technologies that provide movie fans convenient, affordable and accessible ways to view great films.”
BREIN told the British press it was actually talking to the server operators behind the scenes "for some time" but the operators refused to stop the file swapping enablement. "We simply ran out of patience," director Tim Kuik was quoted as saying.
Police in Finland raided a site that offered downloads of the BitTorrent program December 14. They seized equipment and raided residences of 30 site volunteers, and said announcing the raids that the site in question had 10,000 Finnish users who they claim downloaded unlawfully copied content worth millions.
Published reports indicated the site operators in the Finnish raids could be facing up to two years in jail and damage claims from the owners of the copied content.
In a related development, thousands of users of an Internet piracy site, Ftpwelt.com, were reported exposed by German police at the beginning of the week, in a crackdown on swapping pirated software and music and film files.
