p2pnet.net News:- Eight people in nine different locations were arrested on suspicion of committing copyright infringement, and 11 computers seized, when Dutch FIOD-ECD (tax and economic crime) police staged an anti-p2p raid against Releases4u and Shareconnector, eDonkey sites in The Netherlands.

“Releases4U and ShareConnector offered links to illegal files that were checked for content and quality, especially the latest movies, games, music and other content,” says a post on Respect P2P from Simon Moon, quoting an original article by Laurens Verhagen.

The raids were part of a concerted entertainment industry attack launched in the last few days against p2p file sharers and operators in North America and Europe.

“Our patience was up, after which we went to the authorities”, Brein director Tim Kuik says in the story. Brein is the Big Four music cartel’s enforcement unit in The Netherlands.

“The people behind the sites told Webwereld a while ago that there is nothing illegal about so called ed2k links,” says Verhagen, continuing:

“The hosting provider of the 2 sites, Mindlab, earlier refused to take down the 2 sites. ‘As long as offering these links is not a crime, we will let them run their sites’, Zefanja Nafzger declared to Webwereld earlier.”

Adopting well-practiced Big Music intimidation tactics, Kuik says Brein will hold not only SC and R4U “responsible for the damages,” but also Mindlab, the provider, and, “Kuik estimates the damages sought to be “several millions (of Euros)”.

Moreover, the Dutch prosecutor’s office, “is likely to start a criminal procedure against the site owners,” the post states, adding:

“The maximum penalty is 4 years in prison, according to Kuik. Kuik says that services like SC and R4U hide behind ‘false reasoning that illegal files are actually hosted on different servers and that the actual exchange doesn’t take place on their own servers’.

More to come …

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See:-
anti-p2p raid - ShareConnector and Relases4U taken down, Respect P2P, December 14, 2004
industry attack - Hollywood vs BitTorrent, p2pnet, December 15, 2004

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 15th, 2004 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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