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Illegal File Trading Draws Two P2P Raids In Europe

Posted by timothy on from the but-it's-our-perfect-right-except-wait-hold-on dept.

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.

2 of 816 comments (clear)

  1. Official statement by Finnish police by kinki · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    --


    ++K

    <[letter kay][at][number seventy seven][dot][finnish TLD]>
  2. Few major details by Jarnis · · Score: 5, Informative

    - 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.