Sweden's first ISP which has some of the largest and fastest servers in Europe has been raided by Swedish police as a result of operating servers offering some 23 terabytes of copyright infringing content. The four servers seized contained a total of around 1,800 movies, 5,000 software applications and 450,000 audio files. One server alone had enough content to amount to 3.5 years of continuous playback according to the authorities and was reputed to be Europe's largest pirate server.
This raid
has been seen hailed by MPAA as well as a major blow to online piracy within Europe. These servers have likely been operating for several years according to US copyright protection experts, but it was not until recently that an increased crack down on piracy within Sweden resulted in this raid along with around 20 smaller raids by the Swedish authorities over the past month.
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The raid was carried out on Thursday at the Stockholm offices of Bahnhof, Sweden's oldest and largest ISP, which U.S. copyright protection experts have considered a haven for high-level Internet piracy for years. "This was a very big raid," said John Malcolm, worldwide anti-piracy operations director at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which represents Hollywood's major studios. "The material that was seized contained not only evidence of a piracy organization operating in Sweden but of online piracy organizations operating throughout all of Europe," he told Reuters. Bahnhof, the first major ISP raided by the Swedes without advance notice, was home to some of the biggest and fastest servers in Europe, the MPAA said in a statement. Read the full article here. |
It is not clear what file sharing networks these servers may have been running on, but to ever was accessing content from these servers would be like a major loss to them. I find it interesting why the ISP would be willing to provide several high end servers with a huge amount of storage just to illegally share out pirated content. It seems like they had every well known film, song and software package on the planet, or at least within Sweden.
Source: Reuters - Top Stories
