Spanish police target 15 indexing sites

April 9, 2006

The spanish police has developed a new operation against websites dedicated to illegal filesharing, specially movies, music, games and applications. In this operation, without precedents in Europe, 17 websites were blocked and 15 persons arrested in distinct places of the country. Most of them were computer engineers and network administrators of large enterprises.

The detentions took place in Madrid, Puerto de Sagunto, Bilbao, Ponferrada, Mataré³, Sant Adriá del Besos, Zaragoza, Palma de Mallorca, Alicante and Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The administrators of the websites profited about 900.000 euros anually in advertisement and contracts made with virtual casinos, paid pornographic material and virtual computer shops.

The investigation has begun in October of 2005, started by some denounces made by Brigada de Investigacié³n Tecnolé³gica por la Federacié³n para la Proteccié³n de la Propiedad Intelectual (FAP), the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE) and the Asociacié³n de Gestié³n de Derechos Intelectuales (AGEDI), against the owners of these websites, which functioned as the necessary vehicle to obtain illegal backups of recent products on the market, throught programs like Emule, Bittorrent, Edonkey or Azureus.

The move is highly unusual, as Spain has long been known as tolerant of file-sharing and P2P activities. Among many other important P2P developments, it's the home of Pablo Soto, developer of Piolet and the Manolito P2P network. This lenient attitude towards file-sharing appears to be shifting, as these raids mark the first time such an event has occurred in Spain.

According to the police press release, today's raids were the culmination of a lengthy investigation that began in October 2005. The result of this investigation purports the closure of 17 indexing sites, however several are still operational. The remaining operational sites are pctracker.com, pctorrent.com, pctorrent.net, pctorrent.org and tododatos.com.

In an effort to avoid prosecution, the police state all of the 17 indexing sites were hosted outside of Spain. The administrators/owners however, continued to reside in Spain.

"The suppliers of services are not responsible for the [actions of their users], it is as if Post office were responsible for which their shipments contain."

Read the full article in Spanish here.

Source: AI via Slyck