Major Piracy Bust Against Top Providers
An anonymous reader writes "It appears the German copyright authority has launched a massive offensive against top warez providers. According to Slyck, GVU (the German version of the RIAA/MPAA) coordinated a wide spread effort that included the seizure of 20 servers and 30 arrests in 5 countries - Germany, Austria, Holland, Poland and the Czech Republic."
The interesting part ist, that according to Heise News http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/68760 (in German) the police raided the GVU offices in Hamburg. It is assumed that the GVU paid some people for administering warez-servers. Maybe they used it at a honey-pot, but is was illigeal participation, if it is true.
It is not possible to use technology to solve social problems
From the article: Initially, these raids may place a damper on spread of pirated material, however the allure of public recognition is simply too great for many to avoid. With time, their role in the online warez community will most likely be replaced.
This is news? It's been like this since way, way, way before the World Wide Web was invented. (Yes, children, there was software piracy back in the days of 5.25" floppy disks.)
Of course, with the Internet, all the other warez sites on the planet can easily fill the void left by the ones that were just shut down.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
-B