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."

Comments

Phonebook websites

[Killjoy_NL]

Dear Police,

According to my research, there are a lot of criminals being referenced in the phonebook websites worldwide, making it easier for them to communicate.
Please take those sites down too.

Sincerely,

Killjoy_NL

Re:Phonebook websites

[sakdoctor]

According to my research, 90% of the people listed in the phone directory are pirates, with a high degree of certainty.
The rest are ninjas.

Re:Phonebook websites

[Anonymous Coward]

Allow me to play devil's advocate.... What if that percentage of "allegedly" copyrighted material was 80%, or 50% or only 25%?

  Where do you draw the line in making a blanket judgement about a site that is acting as an Index of copyrighted material? What if the website indexed a legitimate percentage of non-copyrighted material - in addition to the copyrighted materials? Those with the best lobbyist / deepest pockets wins?

Re:Phonebook websites

[Hazel Bergeron]

Copyright and patent infringement are the crimes of speaking forbidden things (whatever spin you like to put on it as benefitting mankind, this is fact). I guess it's an extension of this absurdity that that it becomes criminal to speak locations to things which it is forbidden to speak.

Of course, a list of criminals isn't quite the same thing as a list of locations.

Re:Phonebook websites

[Noughmad]

All ninjas have unlisted numbers, you insensitive clod!

Re:Phonebook websites

[Arancaytar]

Bingo! Comparing the unauthorized distribution of data to the sexual abuse of children, and it only took two comments to get there.

Now all we're missing is "terrorists" and "communists".

Re:Phonebook websites

[SharpFang]

I guess the sex offender registry should be shut down then.

Re:Phonebook websites

[Hazel Bergeron]

All I'm hearing is that ninjas are cowards.

Re:Phonebook websites

[Anonymous Coward]

Furthermore, how is indexing copyrighted material wrong? If anything, the infringing parties are the ones making the content available without proper authorization. If indexing copyrighted data is illegal, I can think of several search engines that are going to get in trouble real soon (or rather, their CEOs). Unless the governments, judges and police are hypocrites and decide to make an exception with them, of course.

Re:Phonebook websites

[datapharmer]

But you aren't arresting the people using the phone book, you are arresting the people making the phone book. Even if the phone book could potentially be used for bad things, it is the right of the publisher (at least in the U.S.) to make it. It is called free speech. There is a crap ton of print material out there from fringe groups that isn't stopped on this premise, much of it far more dangerous about how to commit crimes and blow stuff up and make dangerous drugs, but we don't arrest the people printing those. We might "ban" the books, but the authors are protected since they claim it is "for entertainment" or "educational." Why isn't the same true for websites cataloguing content. Honestly it reminds me of the case of a college student paper whose editors got in trouble in the 70s because they printed a listing of abortion clinics in other states where it was legal (the state they were in it was not). Eventually the thing got thrown out - it was free speech. The entire idea of spending millions of dollars attacking websites and thought crime is ridiculous no matter how you look at it. We'll be fighting the "war on piracy" forever, just like the "war on terror" and the "war on drugs." Fighting against ideas is like tilting at windmills!

Re:Phonebook websites

[aaaaaaargh!]

Because we all know that child molesting and copyright infringement is basically the same thing, don't we Mr. Analogy-Guy?

Re:Phonebook websites

[Taco Cowboy]

If listening to a pirate radio is illegal then only BIG BROTHER will have control over what is legal and we will all be restricted to listen (and watch) the "LEGALIZED CHANNELS".

1984 in the 21st century?

Re:Phonebook websites

[geogob]

Not all ninjas are good at being ninjas...

Re:Phonebook websites

[AmiMoJo]

Where do you draw the line

Where the music industry tells you too. It is easier, faster and cheaper to bullshit the police into arresting site admins than it is to go the proper legal route and sue them. Also makes up for deficiencies in local laws that fail to make linking to copyright material without permission a crime.

Someone should tip them off about Google's filetype:torrent feature.

Re:Phonebook websites

[torako]

Gegen die Verantwortlichen von KINO.TO und ihre Helfer wird wegen Verdachts der Bildung einer kriminellen Vereinigung zur gewerbsmäßigen Begehung von Urheberrechtsverletzungen in über einer Million Fällen ermittelt.

Press release of the Public Prosecutor General of Dresden. They are accusing the kino.to operators of building a criminal organization that infringed in more than one million cases and led to a profit in the seven figures.

What's the suffix for Somalia?

[ArsenneLupin]

Kino.to goes down, welcome kino.so ! In any case, that domain would be more fitting for pirates.

Summary incomplete

[aepervius]

"Kino.to hosted no illicit content itself, but indexed material stored on file-hosters and other streaming services."

Copying and pasting the first paragraphn is 1) misleading 2) an extremely poor way to do a SUMMARY. This is what is missing "GVU states that Kino.to was working closely with the sites that hosted the copyrighted films, and that they profited from commercial partnerships with these companies."

So it was not a SIMPLE linking as the first paragraph make seem to believe.

Re:Summary incomplete

[PerformanceDude]

"Kino.to hosted no illicit content itself, but indexed material stored on file-hosters and other streaming services." Copying and pasting the first paragraphn is 1) misleading 2) an extremely poor way to do a SUMMARY. This is what is missing "GVU states that Kino.to was working closely with the sites that hosted the copyrighted films, and that they profited from commercial partnerships with these companies." So it was not a SIMPLE linking as the first paragraph make seem to believe.

Even still, why not go after those sites that hosted the films instead?

Because in Russia films host you... No seriously - it is obvious that those sites are in "uncooperative" jurisdictions. So they go for the closer target to get some press. Kino.ru/so/ir/kp will likely be available any day now.

Re:Summary incomplete

[bemymonkey]

They did... according to most German tech sites, the same people who owned the file hosting sites also happened to be the owners of kino.to. Or something like that...

Anyway, they took the hosting sites down too.

Re:Summary incomplete

[think_nix]

Copying and pasting the first paragraphn is 1) misleading 2) an extremely poor way to do a SUMMARY. This is what is missing "GVU states that Kino.to was working closely with the sites that hosted the copyrighted films, and that they profited from commercial partnerships with these companies."

So it was not a SIMPLE linking as the first paragraph make seem to believe.

Good point. Also stated in these articles here: (sorry could not find anything in english) http://heise.de/-1257486/ and http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/0,1518,767375,00.html/

Basically what was stated is that not only was kino.to taken down but also the filehosting and portal sites behind it. The people running these sites (kino.to and others) are not explicitly being charged for linking copyrighted material(ASFAIK this is still somewhat of a grayzone in Germany) But rather for building an organized criminal organization. If prosecuted in a German criminal court this could lead to a 5 year jail sentence.

Re:Summary incomplete

[somersault]

Upholding the law is sane.

The law itself may not be sane in some places, due to the real world changing over time.

Re:Summary incomplete

[tibit]

You have a point. I remember how hard was it to get Microsoft's development tools in Poland in the 90s. Things such as driver development kits, early "Visual" langauges, MSDN content were available within 45 minutes from the local pirates -- that's about as long as it took to copy things, or, later, burn them to CDs. Getting the same from local Microsoft reps/offices was a multiweek bureaucratic hurdle, even if you had money in your hand and were willing to pay right then and there. To be frank, Microsoft only recently got a clue and Windows 7 is the first version IIRC that you can buy as a download. I hate the wait and waste of resources that is physical shipping of media and license keys.

Of all places....

[Anonymous Coward]

a title using "pirates" for copyright infringers. I'd actually be interesting in a massive police operation against gunships carrying armed pirates off the coast of Belgium. Until then....

kino.to was a cesspit

[zaibazu]

The site was well known for fake videoplayer plugins that lured unaware users into useless subscriptions.

Download and raw DVD tax

[sourcerror]

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.

Spain has a tax on empty CDs/DVDs. Wasn't the justification for that to be that it would make non-profit piracy tolerated? (In my country, Hungary we have a similar tax, and it protects users of pirate sites.) This is the first time I hear that users of pirate sites are also prosecuted in Europe. What next, bittorrent users? (Like with Hurt Locker in US.)

Re:Download and raw DVD tax

[Opportunist]

We got that joke running here as well (as do most countries afaik). The gag in it all is the combination of various little bits that make the whole "media tax" very fishy.

1. Allegedly, the reason for that levy on blank media is that you, the consumer, will use them to record copyrighted material, e.g. by making a copy of a record on a blank tape, or in today's word, a copy of the DVD that you borrowed from a friend. Our law even has a section that explicitly allows you to borrow legally bought media from personal friends (nobody on the internet is your friend, btw, that's established in court, so any internet sources are not part of the deal) and create a copy of it for your personal use.

2. Every single commercial DVD and BluRay (that would be subject to the grounds established in the first bullet point) now comes with copy protection.

3. The law now explicitly also disallows circumventing protection of any sort.

Question for 100: How am I supposed to execute my right to a copy if copy protection prevents me from copying and I must not disable this protection (even if it's trivial)?

Re:Download and raw DVD tax

[SimonInOz]

The problem is simple. It costs USD200,000,000 to make a movie, right? (Ok, that's an expensive one - but what the heck, I like expensive ones).

Now, a fair number of movies are flops - and it's hard to predict this in advance.

So the studio needs to earn an awful lot of money from the good ones to stay in business (and we all want the movies to get made, right?)

How do you do it? If everyone downloads the movie for free, then the studio goes broke and doesn't make any more movies. Or do you want everyone else to pay, and just special computer-savvy people to get it for free? Is that it? Because that's what's happening now. Doesn't sound quite fair to me.

So stop moaning about how the studios are stealing your money - instead come up with a decent workable business model so you get a fair product for a decent prince, and everyone can make a little money.
And we can all sleep much better.

And you can stop moaning.

Re:Download and raw DVD tax

[Opportunist]

Erh... what's that got to do with the levy on media to compensate for copies that must not be created?

The original statement for the reason why that levy exists was that it is legal to record from radio and TV, and that it is also legal (in my country) to create copies of content someone bought for a personal friend. If this is pretty much outlawed by including copy protection on all media and creating a law at the same time that outlaws circumventing copy protection, no matter whether it actually protects anything, the levy isn't justifiable anymore. If it is supposedly a compensation for illegal downloading and illegal copying, we're talking about a blanket fee charged from everyone for the transgressions of some.

Or, to get a car analogy into this game, it's like demanding a certain amount of money from every driver for speeding because all of them could and some even will.

Cool... so

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean we now have official sites where we can stream / download movies in decent formats for reasonable cost? Like DivX sites operating in a erm... unofficial capacity under DMCA safe harbour provisions. These are reasonably anonymous with user uploaded content and a good selection of obscure / hard to find stufff.

AFAIK there's not a single legitimate video site that would satisfy my criteria and even youtube is operating in a grey area. Nobody wants to see compulsory licensing introduced as a result of market failure. Copyright may be a form of monopoly but there's no reason rights holders should be exempt from market forces.

Re:Cool... so

[Opportunist]

Can someone who didn't post yet hand that guy a few mod points? This is pretty much dead on the problem.

I have money and I would gladly spend it on content. If it was offered to me, and offered in an acceptable way.

It takes AGES (years, literally) before a new season of whatever show I'd like to watch gets available in my country. Of course, dubbing and all takes time, but I'd be happy to have it in plain ol' English. And not only because the dubbing stinks for 9 out of 10 shows, where jokes get mutilated to the point where you can't even understand why it was supposedly funny. We're at least one-two seasons behind on our networks. Writer's guild strike? Some actor going bonkers? We won't feel it at least another year or two, and by then they certainly compensated with something. Hey, what a blast!

Then there's my pet peeve about anime. Some of the dubbing is just atrocious if you understand at least a few words of Japanese. They often get butchered with cuts that change the whole story, not to mention that certain animes won't ever make it here since, hey, comics are for kids and these things aren't suitable for our kids! Think I'll ever get to see a German dub of Hellsing OVA? Doubt it. Not only 'cause of the Nazis.

So let me buy what I want to have and I'll gladly throw my money at you! But please refrain from casting it in a package that I cannot accept as a licensee. If you force me to sit through half an hour of unskipable ads, I'm not going to buy. I paid for the content! If you want to litter it with ads, show it to me for free on private TV!

It depends on your definition of "massive"

[Stormtrooper42]

police have arrested a total of 13 people thus far. A 14th person is still being hunted.

13 people. How massive.

Re:It depends on your definition of "massive"

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a massive effort (as in tax euros wasted), not necessarily a massive success.

Re:It depends on your definition of "massive"

[black soap]

Maybe they were all morbidly obese?

just shut all down

[devent]

I really wish they would shut down every site out there that illegal links or shares copyrighted material, so that people have no way at all anymore to download movies and music. Then I would see the whole movie and music industry go in to oblivion because nobody will buy there crap anymore.

Are they really believing that if people couldn't share the movies and music, the people would suddenly buy more stuff? If anything, they would buy less stuff because they don't know anymore new artists or new movies.

As I was 18 I used a lot torrents, and I mean a lot. Like 5 movies and games every week. Now I don't use that anymore, do I buy more movies and more games? No, not at all. Why? Because that crap is just so expensive and I found so many new alternatives for entertainment. Like youtube where I watch news and starcraft 2 movies, and southparkstudios.com, and collegehumour.com. And I read a lot of blogs and news on the internet. For music I have youtube and lastfm and other services.

If I go to the Mediamarkt I see it why I stopped to buy new movies or music and why others are not buying, too. I see it because all the DVDs and all the music CDs are laying there around for years and nobody touches them. Because they are so freaky expensive. 20Euro for a old DVD movie, 30Euro and more for new movies and 30Euro and more for TV series.

Every time I go to the shop and see a nice movie, I see the price and I think: do I really want that DVD for that price? And the answer is every time: no, because it's just too expensive for just one movie that I will watch one day and then it will lay around collecting dust. If the DVDs would be like 5Euro each for new movies and under 5Euro for old DVDs I would buy them. But not for that price, no way. Because I have so much free entertainment.

Re:just shut all down

[samjam]

At ASDA DVD's are £5 a throw and often less.

I buy them and watch them once or twice and think I've had good value for money.

Re:just shut all down

[Kjella]

I really wish they would shut down every site out there that illegal links or shares copyrighted material, so that people have no way at all anymore to download movies and music. Then I would see the whole movie and music industry go in to oblivion because nobody will buy there crap anymore.

Yeah, because it was all going to oblivion before the Internet and P2P, right?

As I was 18 I used a lot torrents, and I mean a lot. Like 5 movies and games every week. Now I don't use that anymore, do I buy more movies and more games? No, not at all. Why? Because that crap is just so expensive and I found so many new alternatives for entertainment. Like youtube where I watch news and starcraft 2 movies, and southparkstudios.com, and collegehumour.com. And I read a lot of blogs and news on the internet. For music I have youtube and lastfm and other services.

Good for you. But everyone else, why are they then downloading all the TV series and movies? Oh, because they actually want them not the youtube garbage. This is the old "I don't like them so neither should you".

Every time I go to the shop and see a nice movie, I see the price and I think: do I really want that DVD for that price? And the answer is every time: no, because it's just too expensive for just one movie that I will watch one day and then it will lay around collecting dust. If the DVDs would be like 5Euro each for new movies and under 5Euro for old DVDs I would buy them. But not for that price, no way

Every time they offer something for X$, there's someone who comes along and says "If only it was available for X/2$ I'd buy it. But if you actually lowered it, most of them would now say X/4$. Or X/8$. Reality is that we know the truth, those who really liked it already bought it at the high price and those who don't will find some other excuse not to buy it.

I don't mind copyright as such when I buy say a paperback book. The author wrote it, whatever deals good or bad he did with the publisher is not my problem, and he charges a price per copy. I buy my copy and that copy is mine, end of story. No DRM, no regions, no EULA, no licensed player that won't let me flip several pages at once (no fast forward), no disappearing ink pages that'll be gone if I resell it (one-time codes), I can sell it, burn it, make paper planes of it and it's a straight deal in every way except for the few limited rights actually in copyright law.

The problem is copyright enforcement which has turned into a huge inconvenience for the customers and is also threatening lots of privacy, due process and other laws. I don't want companies sitting on remote disable/delete buttons to everything I own. Of course you might say I should become a cultural hermit and just reject all commercial TV, movies etc. but I'd rather just take it while I wait for them to clue in and provide a service equal to the torrent sites - at any cost. I do buy the best on BluRay/DVD as the DRM is broken, but they go mostly unopened as I've already had my "digital delivery" long ago.

Re:just shut all down

[samjam]

Sometimes it's easier to get them to agree for an exchange.

Quite possibly when they get to the shelf they won't find any if your friend has them all in his trolly as he walks around frozen veg.

Having already accepted the point, they then give the refund or a credit note or 3 "smiles" or something and your friend can put them back before he leaves.

But I agree, quality and customer service at ASDA are going to hell.

Do something useful

[toxickitty]

Dear retarded goverments please stop wasting more resources on hunting down people who cost corporations money and put it into, I don't know, maybe hospitals, schools, scientific research. You know, things that actually matter...

WTF is wrong with the police?

[mihamicka]

WTF is wrong with the Police? WTF is wrong with this world?.. Police makes this "great" arrests instead of arresting the drug dealers and murderers and many other shits from the streets? OMG..... what world we live in? A world dominated by money? a world where even arrests are made cos some rich ppl who make some movies ask that? WTF? If the movies would no be so expensive probably a site like kino.to would not be needed.... but it is... and all this shit will only bring rage and need for revenge to many ppl including me.. I feel like we all start to live in Ceausescu time... where somebody was "managing" to copy some anti-communist book.. and ppl was giving that book from hand to hand, in secret, to be rad by everybody.... is same shit that so called "movie industry" does.... this reminds me of another article i rad here some time ago.. about some police in Australia who arrested a journalist for writing an article about how to hack computers using Facebook... after a friend's computer was hacked that way... same shit... WTF... police does not work on itself anymore... they work for the ones who pay better? oh and as far as i remember: we, all of us pay the police to be fair... we pay their salaries by paying taxes... WTH?

Re:WTF is wrong with the police?

[gweihir]

Even when they arrest scumbags, the news is not to be trusted. The great European child porn raids of the past came down to basically nothing. If I remember correctly, they got less than 100 convictions for >1000 people raided, because most were actually innocent. The press still reported the high number and that is what the police seemingly was really after.

Pirates violently rob ships at sea.

[nick_urbanik]

The word "pirate" has been hijacked from the meaning of robbing ships at sea using violent threat to meaning copying a CD. This hijacking is convenient to the record industry, but I object to its use here. I do think that robbing ships at sea using violent threats is wrong.

Re:Pirates violently rob ships at sea.

[Opportunist]

So what? Everybody committing a crime against a government is suddenly a terrorist. Inflation doesn't just affect money.

The reasoning

[dnaumov]

Every now and then, someone tries to argue that torrent trackers are supposedly invinsible because they don't outright host copyrighted content, but only the .torrent files. I really wish people would start focusing on something else, because by now it should be blatantly obvious that such reasoning does not fly with the courts. In my country (Finland), there was a court case regarding Finreactor, a major finnish torrent tracker and the defendants tried to argue this very defence. It didn't fly. At all. The court concluded that the site was MOSTLY used to facilitate illegal activity and that the site maintainers made no reasonable effort to clean the site up from torrents pointing to copyrighted content. The tracker admins were found gulty and sentenced to heavy fines.

No, this logic does not apply to Google, because Google is not used MOSTLY to facilitate illegal activity and no, this logic does not apply to gun manufacturers, because guns are mostly used by law enforcement and army and not to commit murder and robbery.

Bad headline?

[sirdude]

Considering that this is /., the submitter's alias is "freedumb" and the linked article is on torrentfreak, isn't the headline rather poorly constructed? The torrentfreak article is titled "Kino.to Raided In Massive Police Operation, Admins Arrested" which is a lot more accurate.

If only Police showed the same willingness for...

[master_p]

...other cases, like corrupted politicians, cartels, drug and people trafficking, the world would be a much better place.

Grey Area

[gweihir]

It is quite possible that at least the ones arrested in Germany will walk free. Currently it is unclear whether linking and indexing even can constitute a crime. It is however unlikely that in that case the state would have to compensate them for lost business, as the business is somewhat amoral, which is a factor in civil law. (Prostitution is legal in Germany, before you ask.)

My guess: Police hoping to make big positive headlines (which they have), but the case will collapse.

Fortune on this page

[pinkushun]

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. -- Henry David Thoreau

We constantly hear about how piracy is a crime, but how on earth did the entertainment industry manage to lobby this so high up that it gained such prominent elevation in the police force?

Re:Any other sites I should know about?

[arth1]

Unfortunately, I'm not in a German speaking country.

Neither am I - how is that a prerequisite for reading German?

Anyhow, just use Google to translate, and if there are certain parts that don't make sense, ask about them. Don't be lazy and expect people here to do a full translation for you.

"Largest piracy bust in history" == 12 people?

[AtlantaSteve]

THIS IS THE GREATEST EXAMPLE OF HYPERBOLE ON SLASHDOT EVER!!!!!

But seriously... customs officials at any of the world's borders make bigger busts than this all the time, for trafficking actual physical goods. For that matter, taking out a single Somali rowboat would be a bigger "piracy bust" than this.

Lame, editors.

And Geeks Bit the Heads Off Chickens

[RobotRunAmok]

The "Waah Waah Content Pirates aren't Pirates, they don't have ships or parrots!" whine is even more tedious than the "Hackers are computer hobbyists, and not necessarily bad!" screed.

Language evolves (c.f., the original meaning of "geek" in the subject here).

I first heard the use of the word "pirate" in this modern context to refer to the people who were stealing satellite signals from premium cable TV networks back in the '70s, pre-dating popular Internet usage by around 15 years. Get over yourselves and move on.