(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Police in as many as 14 European countries are involved in an operation targeting high-ranking members of a “Piracy Pyramid”, and the servers used to deliver that copyrighted content, including those of BitTorrent tracking site The Pirate Bay (www.thepiratebay.org), according to reports from p2p news site TorrentFreak.
According to the Tuesday report, Belgian authorities ordered raids to go ahead on Internet service providers in The Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, Great Britain, Czech Republic, Hungary and Sweden, supplying services to the “Warez Scene” network, which is involved in the underground distribution of pirated content such as software, films, and music – collectively known as warez. The raid is reportedly the product of two years of planning.
Among the targeted ISPs was PRQ (www.prq.se), which, in part, hosts whistle blower website WikiLeaks (www.wikileaks.org). PRQ is also said to be operated by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, two of the founders of The Pirate Bay.
“At 9:00 this morning, five policemen were here,” PRQ’s Mikael Viberg told TorrentFreak. “They were interested in who were using two IP addresses from 2009 and onwards. We have no records of our clients but we’re handing over the e-mail addresses for those behind the IPs. However, it’s rare that our clients have mail addresses that are traceable.”
Tech news blog the Inquirer reports that the police raids managed to make The Pirate Bay inaccessible for a period of time, however, Wikileaks remained online. “Wikileaks is still operational, suggesting that for once it isn’t the centre of attention for law enforcement authorities,” The Register reported. “It is being reported that the police seized a number of servers during the raids.” Swedish prosecutor Frederick Ingblad specified to Swedish news source Expressen.se that the operation is not about Wikileaks.
Tech blog Ars Technica has reported that four individuals have been detained, as well as servers and personal computers.
