A raid against Sweden’s largest and oldest Internet service provider has been getting praise because the ISP is considered a longtime haven for high-level Internet piracy.
“This,” said Motion Picture Association of America anti-piracy operations director John Malcolm of the March 10 raid against Bahnhof, “was a very big raid. "The material that was seized contained not only evidence of a piracy organization operating in Sweden but of online piracy organizations operating throughout all of Europe."
The raid entailed seizing four computer servers, including one thought to be the biggest pirate server in Europe, and enough digital film and music to equal nearly 3 ½ years of uninterrupted play, according to the MPAA.
Malcolm said in a statement that Scandinavian authorities were reluctant to move in the past but had begun a crackdown on Internet piracy recently, with twenty suspects targeted in smaller Swedish raids in the past month.
The Bahnhof servers seized in the raid were said to have held over 1,800 digital movie files, 5,000 software application files, and 450,000 digital audio files. The MPAA said that adds to this being one of the biggest blows struck against online piracy in recent months.
