Archive notice: This article was originally published on March 25, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Last week, investigating-officers seized a total of ten computers at the premises of a local provider. Nine of the servers held large quantities of illegal copies of current cinema films, TV series, entertainment software and music, available for paid download. The tenth computer acted as a so-called tracker server, enabling the illegal exchange of files. Monthly data traffic amounted to 60 terabytes. This corresponds to the data volume of almost 14,000 standard DVDs, made available to well over 13,000 users worldwide – including in Australia and the USA. The computers had been rented by a US citizen. The Frankfurt police officers specialising in intercrime have involved the BKA and are now analysing the seized evidence. According to the officers, further perpetrators are expected to be apprehended and additional servers seized.
The proceedings began in the United States. There, the global film industry association, the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA), learned of a pirated copy of a current film that could be traced back to an award screener by means of an individualised watermark. Since the world’s first illegal copy appeared on a portal site hosted in Germany, the MPAA asked the Gesellschaft zur Verfolgung von Urheberrechtsverletzungen e.V. (GVU) for support. This organisation collated and verified the international findings, supplemented them with more in-depth information and immediately filed a criminal complaint against the portal operator. At the same time, the GVU passed its background knowledge to the Frankfurt criminal police officers, who immediately began their investigations.
On Monday, March 10, the officers first seized the tracker server and a so-called webseed server, whose high-speed Internet connection allows distribution as quickly as possible. An immediate partial analysis by the police revealed extensive data traffic from the tracker server to eight further webseed servers at the same provider. The officers seized these the following Wednesday. The servers contained almost exclusively the very latest works in the highest quality, including films such as ” John Rambo”, “Rush Hour 3” and “The Attic”. Games enthusiasts could choose between titles such as “Crisis Zone” and “Assassin’s Creed”. The operators primarily targeted people from the English-speaking world. By invitation, these users could purchase download quotas for fees ranging from 20 to 500 euros.
According to the GVU, this illegal shadow economy causes the film and entertainment industry annual losses of several hundred million euros. Commercial trading in high-quality pirated copies of popular works at a particularly early stage has especially negative effects. The purchasing power spent on illegal acquisitions is diverted from the legal market. In film, this disrupts exploitation at every stage of the legal distribution chain, including cinemas, DVD sales and rental, pay TV and free TV. For these reasons, the GVU specifically targets professional pirates.
