A very popular Bulgarian torrent website, arenabg.com has been targeted by Bulgarian police after they charged an administrator and system operator of the website for providing links to around 20 million songs. The officials reckon this to be one of Europe's largest online pirate groups, costing the entertainment industry an estimated $30 million.
The website charged a monthly membership fee of four lev (US$2.50) for access to its BitTorrent service, offering a choice of music, movies and software. When the police raided the suspect's homes, they recovered 200 CDs of pirated movies, a PC with 500GB of storage, a laptop, 3 hard disk drives and 3 satellite receivers. The suspects home's also had a high speed link, which they used to obtain pirated content from other pirate websites as well as for the operation of the website and its forum. The website had been brought down on Saturday afternoon and the suspects were released on bail for 10,000 levs (US$5,000) each.
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They arrested an administrator and systems operator for putting download links to 20 million songs - or roughly three million albums - and hundreds of films on the website www.arenabg.com, one of Bulgaria's most popular sites. Users could download as many of the songs and films as they liked after paying a four lev ($2.50) monthly fee. Authorities estimate the damage to the entertainment industry at around $30m. Some further details can be read on Novinite. |
Even though there are a wide range of Torrent based websites, the number of pay-based websites is growing rapidly, since consumers are more likely to be tricked into signing up for something they think is legal only to find that the vast number of so-called 'unlimited download" & '100% legal" websites which require a fee to join only turn out to be scams. Most of these just point unsuspecting customers to freely Torrent websites or file sharing applications, which are just as risky as using them without paying anything. The only difference here is that the Bulgarian website ran its own Torrent service, but still pocketed the membership fees without paying artists.
Feel free to discuss about file sharing on our P2P forum. For more information on avoiding scam music download websites, check out this forum sticky.
Source: Silicon.com
