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Ärende: Swedish Raid on ISP Called Major Blow to Piracy
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Swedish Raid on ISP Called Major Blow to Piracy
Fri Mar 11, 2005 10:18 PM ET

 By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The U.S. film industry on Friday hailed a raid by
Swedish police against an Internet service provider as a major blow to European
piracy of movies and music on the Web.

The raid was carried out on Thursday at the Stockholm offices of Bahnhof,
Sweden's oldest and largest ISP, which U.S. copyright protection experts have
considered a haven for high-level Internet piracy for years.

"This was a very big raid," said John Malcolm, worldwide anti-piracy operations
director at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which represents
Hollywood's major studios.

"The material that was seized contained not only evidence of a piracy
organization operating in Sweden but of online piracy organizations operating
throughout all of Europe," he told Reuters.

Bahnhof, the first major ISP raided by the Swedes without advance notice, was
home to some of the biggest and fastest servers in Europe, the MPAA said in a
statement.

Authorities in Sweden seized four computer servers -- one reputed to be the
biggest pirate server in Europe -- containing enough digital film and music
content for up to 3-1/2 years of uninterrupted play, the organization said.

Malcolm said authorities in Scandinavian countries had been reluctant to take
such action in the past but were recently cracking down on piracy. About 20
individuals suspected of Internet piracy have been the targets of smaller raids
by Swedish authorities during the past month.

The servers seized during the operation contained a total of 1,800 digital
movie files, 5,000 software application files and 450,000 digital audio files
-- amounting to 23 terabytes of data.

The MPAA says the film industry loses $3.5 billion a year to videotapes and
DVDs sold on the black market, but it has no estimate for how much Internet
piracy costs the industry.

Reuters/VNU

(c) Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.


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