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.

Re:Which Site?

[wheany]

Finreactor.com.

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.