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FBI Helps Shut Down Piracy Sites In Romania
An anonymous reader writes: The FBI has taken a major role in the shutting down of at least two popular piracy-torrent sites in Romania, according to a report from Romania's High Court of Cassation and Justice. The popular torrenting domains serialepenet.ro and fisierulmeu.ro are now offline after a series of raids on individuals and companies, including a hosting company in Bucharest thought to have some involvement with the pirate operation.
Once again the world is safe!
FBI programs in Romania have spent more than $4.6mn [PDF] (£2.9mn) in interdepartmental programs and initiatives with Romania-based authorities since 2007, which costs include the placement of an agent within the country’s Organised Crime Directorate – an organization within the Romanian police force – and additional personnel at the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative (SECI) centre, an investment amounting to $3.4mn (£2.1mn).
Looks like 8 million in tax dollars or additional debt spent on this program. I wonder if they have any numbers on the return on investment defending hollywood's interests overseas.
Since when does the FBI have jurisdiction over citizens of Romania ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
serialepenet.ro was a streaming site and fisierulmeu.ro was a file sharing site (similar to rapidshare, mega, etc). Neither of those of are torrent sites. The major torrent trackers in Romania are doing bussines as usual.
This doesn't strike me as a massive crackdown, but it may pave the way for future actions. "serialepenet.ro" looked like a very dodgy attempt to set up an incredibly illegal pay-per-view online system for pirated material. I feel like it's the sort of thing that would be taken down instantly if it had been set up anywhere else than the backwoods of Eastern Europe. Plus, "fisierulmeu.ro" was likely just a free file hosting site that became popular for sharing pirated media (much like the defunct megaupload).
The cynical view would be that this just an attempt to kill off competitors in preparation for launching a similar service. Something very similar happened a few years ago, when they took down the massively popular "vplay.ro" (essentially a free youtube clone that featured all the popular TV shows). Only a few days later, one of the local media moguls launched his own site "voyo.ro" providing the same things vplay had before, only now requiring a monthly subscription.
Meanwhile, private torrent tracker "filelist.ro" is still alive and kicking, and it's gotten so immensely popular everyone's grandma and their dog have an account for it. This action will affect the most PC-illiterate pirates, but won't likely make a dent in overall piracy.
In the early 90's all Romanians were really happy to hear that the USA opened a military base on the Black Sea.
They were happy because the Russians stopped yapping about Romania joining the "Commonwealth of Independent States", that is the former USSR.
Now that base is on the main secret prisons mean to replace Guantanamo Bay.
Really good job there.
No surprise the FBI is so active in the country.
I live in Romania and have used lots of pirating sites out of necessity, not out of unwillingness to pay for content. Romania has only a handful of internet content providers, HBO Go being one of the first (I'm a subscriber). We don't have Netflix, Amazon Prime is a pipedream, Google just recently opened up their ebooks and music store for the Romanian market (I'm already a subscriber for the music bit), but their movies store is still inaccessible here. There are some local online stores affiliated to local TV stations (SeeNow, Antena Play come to mind), but the quality is just as low as the TV stations sponsoring them. HBO Go at least has a reputation (even though they keep their offerings online for too short a time, and their mobile/tablet app severely lags behind the western counterpart in terms of stability and features -- e.g. chromecast support only recently added)
I have no problem with law enforcement trying to put pressure on the pirate sites as long as I can get SOME decent content that I can pay a decent fee for. My problem is, the US should try to convince their media companies to open their offerings to Eastern European markets at the same time (or before) they pressure law enforcement to stop pirates that fill in the content void.
They went after 2 sites that no one has ever heard of. Way to go.
You may not have heard of them, but they are fairly well known in the country and ranked fairly high in Google searches for common terms (although I don't remember ever using them myself).
In a place where a Gigabit consumer internet connections are readily available for 14$/month, it's very easy to set up your own server to host pirated content to locals. This would generate an enormous amount of traffic and allow you to skim some money off of it by serving some well-placed ads. I'm guessing this is probably what got them the attention of the FBI.
(source: http://www.rcs-rds.ro/internet...)
Before I read the summary, I was honestly thinking they finally shut down a few Trojan C&C servers in Romania and thought "about FUCKING time!".
Then I read the summary and realized that, nope, still not doing anything remotely beneficial for the public, our three letter friends.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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