Illegal File Trading Draws Two P2P Raids In Europe

had3l writes "Police in Finland raided the operation of a popular Bit Torrent site and arrested 34 people, 30 of which were volunteers who helped moderate the site. This comes right after the MPAA reported that it would start suing tracker servers." An anonymous reader points to a story (currently at the top of RespectP2P.org's homepage) about the raid yesterday morning of Dutch eDonkey sites Releases4u and Shareconnector.

Comments

WinMX warnings

[kahei]

On WinMX (which isn't as good as it used to be, which is why I dare mention it on /.), recently I have started to get automatic messages sent to me (in Japanese) saying something like:

"The Recording Industry Association of Japan has noticed that you are sharing files whose names match artists or recordings owned by our members. You are reminded that such..." and so on and so on.

I got a couple of these in one day -- haven't run WinMX recently though so I don't know if they are still happening. It would be interesting to try sharing only files with ASCII names and see if that makes a difference.

Re:Privacy

[DaHat]

I've got a friend who got C&Ded for downloading a tv show while running PeerGuardian with all of the latest updates.

Unfortunately, IP blocking like PG is pretty much worthless. Yes, it's easy to find out the IP's of the corporate parents, but they need only get a consumer level DSL/Cable line or have some of their employees run their pirate hunting software at home... and they will be virtually impossible to track down.

Official statement by Finnish police

[kinki]

http://www.poliisi.fi/poliisi/krp/home.nsf/PFBD/28 FB313B1DCD10EAC2256F6A004A5FA5?opendocument in Finnish, sorry.

Re:Official statement by Finnish police

[upside]

The crime investigation unit together with local units is investigating the extensive distribution of films, music and other material on the Internet as a suspected intellectual property crime. Numerous home searches have been conducted around Finland as part of the investigation.

The case involves the distribution of copyrighted material using the BitTorrent-p2p application, which is used to share files between users. Registration is required to access the network [Sic, they are mixing up finreactor with bt]. When a user downloads material on offer, he also becomes a distributor for other users who are downloading the file. The maximum penalty for an intellectual property crime is two years' imprisonment, and these kinds of crimes often involve payment for damages.

Distributed materials included among other things films, music, software and games for a total of about 6000 titles. One title may have contained for example a single CD, the entire back catalog of an artist or several films. The network has been used to distribute material worth many millions of euros.

Four administrators and 30 moderators are from around Finland are suspected of maintaining the network. The network has had an estimated 10 000 users, presumably all Finnish.

The early investigative part of the case will take many months.

Apologies for the awkward translation. Don't know the equivalent legal terms in English that well so some meanings are probably lost. Don't turn me in for pilfering their text.

Few major details

[Jarnis]

- Finreactor (the finnish siten in question) admins solicted for 'donations' - in other words, took money for access to torrent trackers. Also the tracker required registration, and kept 'ratios' for each user. Heck, the *bank account number* of the site was in plain view asking for donations directly to the bank account of the admins. In other words, the activity was very very stupid.

- By Finnish law, the crime becomes 'tekijänoikeusrikos' instead of 'rikkomus' when money is involved. The difference is that for the lesser crime, maximum penalty is just fines - and I doubt police could even get search warrants for the lesser offense.

But in this case since money is involved, and prosecution will claim that there was a goal for financial gain, and it becomes a bigger crime (max 2 years in the can). And suddenly it's easy for the police to get all the details they need from ISPs & search warrants for the busts.

So in other words: Taking money (even if it's just 'donations' to cover tracker bandwidth) is a nice way to get your ass in jail.

The case does have few murky details - they cannot prosecute everyone (over 10000 users supposedly), and distributing the .torrents themselves is a gray area thing. Admins definitely facilitated copyright violations, but... how illegal that is? Can they be strung up for what their users did? It's a test case for P2P in Finland. I think the fact that the admins took money for access to the site will nail their asses for *something*, but the rest is still up in the air.

Remember their true goals

[goneutt]

I know that the boards of the media companies get group chubbies when ever someone suggest systems where they don't have to produce products, hence the cooperation with iTunes.
They dream of the day when no one owns physical media, but instead pays a per use fee to listen or view media.

Also, as long as I can't rent Troma movies at BlockBuster I'm gonna find them on P2P networks. Oh, and if it's not utter garbage I wind up buying them.

Mistranslation

[Anonymous Coward]

"Police in Finland raided the operation of a popular Bit Torrent site and arrested 34 people, 30 of which were volunteers who helped moderate the site.
Register or someone else mistranslated original text. They are suspecting 4 admins plus 30 "powerusers", nobody has been arrested yet. Yesterday police raided admins' houses and seized their computers.

Apparently putting "donations" button to tracker-page got them badly screwed, since now they're were getting direct or indirect monetary benefit for running tracker (which had lot of illegal files).

More or less luckily TPB has already promised to lend it's tracker for Finnish warezors;D

Re:Which Site?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was finreactor.com

Raid in france

[treuf]

Source : http://fr.news.yahoo.com/041215/1/46m9q.html

ALPA (french RIAA) - with the RIAA help, and police today closed a bittorrent hosting site (http://torrent.youceff.com) holding many copyrighted movies.
That site was hosted in France and a court order was sent to catch peoples using the service at the same time - it seems they logged 160000 unique IPs.

Under local lows, the site admin can get up to 3 years of jail + an up to 300000 fine.

Re:Which Site?

[wheany]

Finreactor.com.

Re:Reporting in the media.

[EvilNTUser]

"What's completely, utterly amazing that there hasn't been a single mention of the incident in the news of any of the tv channels, nor anything in the major papers either."

Yes, there was.

"Makes you suspect that the police might actually be controlling any reporting on the subject?"

No, it doesn't.

"Guess that's it for truly independent mass media in Finland."

Troll.

Because of Greed: No

[denis-The-menace]

The Movie Mafia is addicted to high profits.
They pitch it as "Own it today" like you would a book but don't want you to copy it.
So that means they are Licensing it but they will not recognize that you have already
paid for your license when the media fails or gets lost.

Either way they will loose:
-If they loose control: They will get less $ for their movies.
-If they get absolute control: People will start making their own movies and will get NO $.

Re:that certainly answers one question

[Jarnis]

I doubt they have resources to take on the Joe Random Leecher.

And in this case there is a small critical detail - cops have proof that the admins took money ('donations') for access to the tracker.

Basically, indirectly, they were selling warez.

Selling warez is bad.

Re:Ah, but they DID have the copyrighted content

[andrewm]

In fact, since the .torrent file has to directly contain the URL of the tracker itself, you can't simply "upload" the .torrent to a tracker and have it function, unless you know the exact tracker URL that server uses to host its torrent files. If you want to put a .torrent on 10 trackers, you have to create 10 separate .torrent files. You can't reuse the same .torrent file for all 10 trackers.

You are wrong.

I take it you've never heard of multi-tracker torrent files.

Using "announce-list" is an extension to the reference code's "announce" format. One can specify alternate trackers, as well as a priority.

It is in such wide use that I can't imagine anything other than the Python reference code that doesn't support it.

The worlds biggest tracker...

[muffen]

... this is how likely it is that they will be able to shut down the largest bittorrent tracker in the world (and the answer to the question you are thinking about is no, that site is not a tracker) :)

Re:I have said it before and I'll say it again...

[MassacrE]

I would argue that current US copyright laws are immoral. Mass Media and Pop culture are pretty much the only culture we have anymore.

My great grandchildren will not be able to watch the movies or listen to the music I like today because it will _still_ be under copyright in 70 years. How could you possibly think having some random corporate entity charge royalties for "Happy Birthday" can be right moral compromise?

Granted people aren't being physically harmed, but random people are being threatened with lawsuits and financially harmed for something which really benefits the public good; having creative works exposed to as many people as possible.

To take laws written to protect the authors from the powerful publishers and turn them as a weapon for publishers to legally threaten their own customers, how is _that_ moral?

Translations for parent

[upside]

"rikos" == crime
"rikkomus" == misdemeanour

The police must think they have grounds for proving this is a crime, a misdemeanour wouldn't be sufficient to warrant seizing equipment.

It isn't actually illegal (yet) for a natural person to copy material for personal use in Finland, but making it available is. This affects the users.

Secondly, the administrators were aware of and facilitating illegal activity. If you know about illegal activity and don't report it, you're alredy over the line.

The money aspect is probably the biggest issue here.

I've read suggestions that some users' machines were trojaned by a security company employed by the entertainment industry to help gather evidence. If this is true it could add an interesting spin. If this was illegal it won't nullify the evidence (as in the US) but could be very bad publicity for the entertainment industry at the very least.

Re:I download TV shows

[geoffspear]

Copyright owners have the exclusive right to distribute thier works. It's illegal to distribute them without permission, regardless of arguments that the end user could have gotten the work from the owner or his licensee for free.

The fact that you can check a book out from the library does not give me the right to print copies of that book and distribute them for free.

TV Torrents-SuperID's new business.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I wish that type of usage was considered "fair use" but it's not."

Of course not. However I see a business opportunity. Superid's "Did you miss something?" download service. For a small fee, you can download what you missed. Superid gets an income, especially since the IT industry is tanking. The other parties get there cut. And the consumer gets to pay for the convience of watching what they want.

Re:Why the Hatred?

[henni16]

/packs this post in asbestos
Well, not to fuel the flames, but to give my 2 cents about your list of American inventions:

• personal computer: yes, likely
• computer: depends on your definition of computer..probably not
• light bulb: certainly not
• sewing machines: didn't know shit about their invention, but it seems that they weren't an American invention

Not-A-Flame-More-A-PSA:
One thing that Non-USAsians don't like about some Americans is a sometimes met "Pavel Chekovish"-attitude "everything cool must be an American invention".
I remember that high school exchange student from Italy that was asked "do you have pizza in Italy?".. ;-)

Re:What a haul...

[hb253]

I agree that CD's are overpriced. However, you cannot say it costs NOTHING to produce them. There are many costs that come into play including:

• the salaries/benefits of the people who work for the record companies.
• the cost of machinery and materials to produce and package CDs.
• cost of warehousing and shipping
• the costs of unsold inventory

And I'm sure there are many other items I've omitted.

Re:What a haul...

[geoffspear]

"I know nothing about Finnish law, but I'll make pronouncements about what it says anyway."

Yeah, real interesting.

TFA states that those arrested face 2 years in prison if convicted. I, for one, would assume that implies that FInland does have criminal penalties for copyright infringement. According to a quick google search, Italy and the UK (which are not the US), at least, also have criminal penalties for copyright infringement. I'd assume many other countries do as well.

Note that some violations, like in the US, are not criminal. Large violations generally are.

Please don't post "facts" if you have no idea what you're talking about.