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European Pirates Arrested in Massive Police Operation
freedumb2000 writes "Europe just witnessed one of the largest piracy-related busts in history with the raid of the popular movie streaming portal Kino.to. More than a dozen people connected to the site were arrested after police officers in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands raided several residential addresses and data centers. Kino.to hosted no illicit content itself, but indexed material stored on file-hosters and other streaming services."
Let's say there was a phone directory that listed people, 90% of whom were child molesters with a high degree of certainty. Wouldn't it make sense to use that phonebook and the company that maintained it, to get a hold of the molesters, assuming the problem was getting sufficiently out of hand and there were few or no other ways to get to this group?
And if the point of said directory would be exclusively to bring these molesters together, wouldn't it be fair to shut down the company itself as well? According to TFA the site reported “The domain of the site you are trying to access was closed on suspicion of forming a criminal organization to commit professional copyright infringement.”
Now, you may argue that child molestation is more rare, well hidden and (far) more serious than piracy (if that is even what you'd want to call it). But that won't change the fact that something illegal and organized in the opinion of the powers that be was going on here. And whether you're of the opinion that it should be legal, or that the offenders should be prosecuted, getting the thing to court is worthwhile.