(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — After an investigation coordinated by Bulgarian authorities, four websites have been shuttered in what has been deemed the largest operation against Internet piracy ever seen in the Balkan nation.
According to reports from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (www.ifpi.org), which represents the recording industry across 66 countries worldwide, the Bulgarian Police’s Cyber Crime Unit estimate that users paid “an organised criminal network” 5 million Bulgarian leva (€2.5 million) to access the illegal services, and additional revenue was raised through advertising sales.
The investigation took several months and was the result of a complaint by the Bulgarian Association of the Music Producers (www.bamp-bg.org), which represents the country’s music industry. On July 29, investigators raided the premises of several ISPs, finding servers with more than 120 terabytes of unlicensed content – the equivalent of more than 200,000 CD-Rs.
“The sheer scale of this operation, the quantity of seized pirate content and the vast financial profit of the criminals involved shows clearly what an enormous problem piracy is in Bulgaria,” BAMP executive director Ina Kileva said in a statement. “It is depriving creators and artists of their livelihoods, feeding organised crime and frustrating all efforts to build a successful legal digital music market.
“Officers from the Cyber Crime Unit are to be congratulated for their professional work in defence of intellectual property rights online. It is only by such actions that Bulgaria can hope to develop a legitimate digital economy in the future.”
The four sites under investigation are nanoset.net, rapidadd.com, 4storing.com and afasta.com. Each of these sites were shut down for allegedly distributed books, films, games, music and software illegally on a large scale. The investigation is part of the Bulgarian Culture and Interior Ministries’ anti-piracy strategy. Copyright holders will be represented on the Culture Ministry’s Intellectual Property Protection Council.
Peer-to-peer networking blog, p2pnet, notes that the IFPI report makes it seems that the sites were taken offline before being proven guilty of a crime. The acerbic post goes further, suggesting that Bulgaria is being bullied by the large international media companies.
The IFPI noted that Internet piracy remains very prevalent in Bulgaria, which ranks the lowest in Europe in terms of revenues from physical format sales. IFPI suggests that there is a strong culture of piracy, with three of the top five most visited Bulgarian websites – aside from international sites such as Google or Facebook – are infringing services, according to data from traffic monitoring firm Alexa (www.alexa.com). Further, income from digital sales is negligible, and the piracy rate estimated at nearly 100 percent.
Defending the interests of copyright holders from alleged pirating operations worldwide, the IFPI has been very active recently in East Central and South-East Europe.
In June, police in Hungary’s capital, Budapest, seized 50 computer servers in several server hotels and at a technical college in an action against various online piracy operations. Police reported that 500 terabytes of content was found on the servers including data allegedly used to illegally distribute thousands of copyrighted works via torrent sites both locally and internationally.
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