Police raid German MPAA
p2p news / p2pnet: The German Federation Against Copyright Theft (GVU), the German version of the Hollywood-owned MPAA, seems to have been following the example of its Swedish counterpart by planting evidence to facilitate police raids on alleged copyright infringers.
At the GVU’s instigation, police raided alleged release groups in Germany, Austria, Holland, Poland and the Czech Republic.
However, “The German anti-piracy association GVU, amongst others, the anti-piracy arm of the International Motion Picture Association (MPA), was itself subject to a large-scale raid on FTP-Servers used for distributing Movies in the Warez-Scene,” says Julian Finn on zeiTspuk, quoting Heise.
“Two independent sources gave heise.de information, that the GVU had been giving the admin of a ‘warez’-site money and hardware to get the IP-adresses and other logged information,” states the post, going on:
“According to the article, even illegal copies themselves were provided.”
The GVU confirmed police “had been in the Hamburg-Office” to “to verify the information that was provided in order to stage the raids,” says zeiTspuk.
In 2005, Hollywood anti-p2p organization Svenska Antipiratbyrån (APB) was found to have bribed an informer, supplied servers and uploaded copyrighted materials in a bid to shaft the country’s largest ISP, Bahnhof. Police acting for APB ultimately raided Bahnhof’s Stockholm offices.
The APB site was hacked uncovering various items, including many self-congratulatory emails involving MPAA stalwarts John Malcolm, Dean Garfield and the APB’s Henrik Pontén.
Among other fulsome expressions of gratitude for the Stockholm raid, ” Henrik, this is truly phenomenal,” said Garfield. ” We are all very proud of you. I am sure you are a bit unpopular with the pirate community in Sweden right now. Great work.”
“It’s not terribly difficult to be the first one at the scene of an emergency to perform the heroics if you caused the emergency in the first place,” observes a Reader’s Write to an earlier post.
(Thanks, Julian)
Also See:
alleged release groups – Europe release groups raided, January 24, 2006
zeispuk.de – Raid on GVU, January 24, 2006
bribed an informer – Big Music’s Bahnhof Bust, March 22, 2005
self-congratulatory – Swedish anti-p2p site hacked: more, March 15, 2005
January 26th, 2006 at 6:43 am
But if you ask them why so many ppl have “negative” opinions of bigbiz, they’ll honestly have no idea. The power of doublethink is just amazing. I wish that idiot Orwell had never written 1984.
He gave them too many ideas.