German enforcers raid file share op
The GVU, the MPAA’s German ‘enforcement’ agency, and German police and ‘prosecutors’, have shut down the p2p Unreality file share server, well known in “the scene” as the “top source of pirate files,” according to GVU.
Called UNR, it apparently had more than 11 terabytes capacity and, depending on the scale of compression, the GVU says in a statement, could store more than two million music MP3-files, or 2000-20,000 movies.
“Prosecutors and police, together with IT-experts from the GVU, raided the offices of the IT service company, GATEL (Global Access), in Frankfurt, where the illegal server was located,” says GVU. “Additionally the flat and workplace of the main suspect, Marco C., and seven other locations in the federal states of Hessen and Nordrhein Westfalen were raided. Several thousand data carriers and PCs and a huge number of PC-components and hard disc drives were seized from Marco C.’s flat.”
It doesn’t mention whether or not the MPAA and/or GVU intend to pay the appropriate authorities for using German police and prosecution units for entertainment industry business.
The raid happened at the beginning of September and, “The GVU has succeeded in landing a major blow against organized Internet crime in Germany,” says the statement, quoting a GVU spokesman as saying most, “pre-release movies and games reached the web via this server and mass distribution started from here, crossing borders into neighbouring countries. Cutting off UNR from the Web means that we have stopped one of the largest release platforms for pirated material. Further investigations will show whether UNR was also important for the international piracy scene, since English-language release groups were involved as well.”
The statment goes on, “Approximately 400 users had access to the server, which was password-protected to exclude “normal” users of the web. The suspects made available the latest film- and games-releases to each other in order to distribute this material further for money.
“The position of these offenders is comparable to the position of a distribution manager in the legitimate business. The material is sent to wholesalers and not to the end users”, Bernd Kulbe said.
Active on the UNR server were:
DIGITAL VIDEO LABS (DVL) (ENGLISH)
THE CHOSEN FEW (TCF) (ENGLISH VCD)
BooZerS (ENGLISH DVDR)
GERMAN DIVX SOLUTIONS (GDS) (GERMAN DIVX)
ALPHAFLIGHT SCREENER (AFS) (GERMAN VCD)
CHILL OUT MOVIEZ (COM) (GERMAN SVCD/SERIES)
WORLD OF MOVIES (WOM) (GERMAN DIVX)
ALPHA CINEMA PROJECT (ACP) (GERMAN VCD/SVCD/DVDR)
WORLD OF VIDEOS (WOV) (GERMAN DIVX) (Not the video rental chain WOV) GENESIS (GNS) (GERMAN GAMES)
RiSE (ENGLISH APPS) RORiSO (ENGLISH APPS)
FUSIONTV (FTV) (ENGLISH SERIES)
DA CHRONIC NIGGAS (DcN) (ENGLISH DIVX)
PANTHEON (GERMAN/ENGLISH APPS)
MIRACLE (ENGLISH PS2)
