DV8 busted. But music isn’t warez …
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:-A ‘warez release group’ has been severely disrupted after the UK police began arresting members of this group last month, said TorrentFreak yesterday.
This ’self proclaimed’ major scene player, and self proclaimed ‘top of the piracy pyramid’ release group, suffered a serious setback when police and ‘investigators’ from Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music’s BPI on Tuesday launched an early morning raid on a senior member of the group.
The arrests coincided with similiar raids raids on other UK based file sharing groups such as TV Links and AradiTracker.
As many as 15 cops from Metropolitan Police’s Hi-Tech Crime Unit, and BPI ‘investigators,’ apparently took the suspects by surprise and carted off several for questioning.
During the raid, hardware and computer equipment located at the scene were of great interest to the police, who seized computers, cell phones, CD and MP3 players, bank statements, and other items.
After intensive questioning in the presence of the corporate music industry’’s BPI, the suspects were charged with conspiracy to defraud (the music industry) and were later released on bail.
Police and the BPI ‘investigators’ were unable to find several other members of this group who, according to sources familiar with the event, have gone into hiding.
Several servers have been shut down and accounts closed with the host, SceneForce.
From my initial investigation, all DV8 was releasing was music CDs ripped into mp3 format, and tagged as ‘Promo’ or ‘Advance’.
The scene consisted of approximately 10 young individuals, not all of them living in the UK.
The ‘topside’ asset used for their releases seems to be www.SceneForce.com, and DV8 refers to a UK comic book.
DV8 releases also coincide incredibly accurately with the official release of the music that could easily be found thru retail outlets, or from iTunes.
The group is also accused of releasing over 3,000 albums over the past year. They bought, they ripped, they uploaded and in Big Music’s eyes, this is worse than nuclear fallout, global warming, or genocide.
Music isn’t warez
First of all, music is not considered ‘warez’ in the file sharing community.
Warez is a common term used to describe software, or softwarez, for unauthorized copies.
Warez for short.
And the naming convention selected, DV8, in reference to a comic book, is definetly ‘youth’ inspired.
SceneForce was registered via TOUCOWS, a generalized DNS similiar to GoDaddy, and the site is hosted in Denmark. The registrant info for this site contains useless data, like contact phone numbers 1234567890. These are definitely kids at best.
As for the claim this release group is ‘near the top of the piracy pyramid’, well, they are certainly NOT. It looks like in youthful glee, they purchase CDs, rip them, and then post them to a topside board. Dangerous to say the least.
I’ve mentioned on many occasions that if you leave muddy footprints while surfing the web, someone will be able to track you down. They seemed to take no notice of this and were easily found —- and charged. Several of the members are still at large, in hiding, probably in Denmark or Germany.
BPI Deputy Dawgs
The critical part of all this information is the BPI played a major role in the investigation, and prosecution of these kids.
Since when did the music industry become experts in investigations? Perhaps they deputized themselves and forced their interests into the actual policing of crimes. Perhaps the UK Police are lacking in the expertise to identify a conspiracy to defraud the music industry. That must be it.
Which leads me to my next worrisome piece of information.
What the fuck is ‘conspiracy to defraud the music industry’?
How did rape, murder and aggravated assault take a back seat to ‘actual’ crimes of copyright infringement?
If, in fact, these kids were profiting from their activities, I could see this as a commercial copyright infringement, and subject to lawful intervention. But I doubt this the case here.
Would there not typically be an investigation before the arrest of ‘infringers’?
I can easily surmise the police were ‘bamboozled’ by the same rhetoric used on the lamescream media, making them believe these kids were just short of terrorists in distributing content owned by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music’s without giving them their rightful ‘cut’.
In the end, the MAFIAA has stopped nothing, curtailed file sharing by 0%, and saved the world from the terrorist activities of a bunch of teenagers sharing music without presenting the mandatory ‘vig’ to the music industry.
I expect that BPI will demand the summary execution of the perpetrators of this vicious criminal activity, all the while getting incredible mileage from the brainwashed media that they’ve ’saved the day’ by thwarting this henious violation of their copyrights.
No need to stay tuned.
surfer – p2pnet
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June, 2009
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June 19th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Without the entertainment cartels, two thirds or more of the world’s retired (or fired) police officers would be out of work.
They don’t need retirement pensions with Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music, and Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, just waiting to snap them up as soon as they leave their former employers.
Retired cops religiously maintain their contacts. That in turn means the cartels have immaculate connections under the Old Pals Act.
You don’t have to be a genius to figure out the implications.
Cheers!
June 19th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Admin from DV8/RAGEMP3 was selling the promos on Ebay. Tha’s what got him caught. I’m gonna miss all the crunk from RAGEMP3
June 19th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
hahahah, now thats a poster child for how NOT to share files.
June 19th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
“Admin from DV8/RAGEMP3 was selling the promos on Ebay. Tha’s what got him caught. I’m gonna miss all the crunk from RAGEMP3 ”
So, in the long run, it was a bunch of RETARDS that didnt need to be doing such stupid SHIT in the first place?
WONDERFUL……..maybe they’ll grow up some day and be a REAL asset to filesharing!
we can hope!
stw
June 19th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Are you, poster, a retard? You evidently have NO clue what you’re writing about. What are you on about SceneForce or whatever it was? Thats just a shitty public site that indexes releases of ALL groups in a database. DV8 were not linked, in any way, with any shit website like that. You evidently have NO idea how the scene works, this entire article is a complete joke.
June 19th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Agreed.
June 19th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
and wtf is “topside”, I think you mean a topsite unless you are talking about a tasty cut of beef ?
sceneforce… a top’lol’side… oh dear.
June 19th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
I guess pirates make typo’s also
June 19th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
“Since when did the music industry become experts in investigations? Perhaps they deputized themselves and forced their interests into the actual policing of crimes. Perhaps the UK Police are lacking in the expertise to identify a conspiracy to defraud the music industry. That must be it.”
Am I the only one who’s seeing scary parallels between the copyright industries of today and the Catholic church of the middle ages?
June 19th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
‘topside’ is a common term used by underground file sharing communities to define a public portal that can be easily accessed and used for communications, an example of a topside board is http://www.macserialjunkie.com. It is used to anonomously post serial numbers, access to online files for download and access information to private servers.
topside is the opposite of underground, not a typo.
stw
June 19th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
sheeez kids these days
June 20th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
Oh and MP3’s ripped from CD’s then put out ‘in the wild’ = WAREZ. It’s all 0’s and 1’s in the end and it’s ALL warez regardless of content. And this only the beginning. Wait till ACTA comes….
June 20th, 2009 at 10:02 pm
@EPiPHN0N3
the RIAA called, they want their opinion back.
stw
June 21st, 2009 at 1:16 pm
@surfer (how original)
Maybe you missed my comment on how I was gonna miss RAGEMP3
My words are WARNINGS not comments.
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:07 pm
‘ill alert the media’ – John Gielgud
June 26th, 2009 at 8:16 am
I’ll second that we have no links to DV8 or RAGEMP3. We don’t “host” anyone and are not a “topside topsite”. I think your investigation sucks.
We are partly hosted in Denmark, yes. Not that it serves any relevance at all, we aren’t Danish, we just like the connectivity we get there. We chose to use bogus details in our WHOIS information because sites like this like to poke around. If we had genuine details in there, you’d have posted them all over wouldn’t you? Then we’d have had all kinds of assholes telephoning us.
On behalf of all the SceneForce staff, I’m sorry some of you think it’s “shitty”. Yes we list releases and some of the less informed among you will think it’s endangering the scene and is a huge problem. It isn’t. No group has ever been busted in whole or in part due to a public list of releases. Our main aim is to have a comprehensive history of the scene. We care as much about stuff that got released in 1857 as we do 2 seconds ago in 2009.
Love and kisses, One / SceneForce Staff