James Delahunty
29 Apr 2009 20:24
Police in Hungary have raided and shut down several BitTorrent and Warez sites in actions against growing Internet piracy in the country. Hungary was kept on the piracy "watch list" for many reasons, one being the existence of several "pay to leech" websites.
"It is difficult to energize police and customs officials to investigate Internet cases because Hungarian court decisions are not a deterrent," an International Intellectual Property Alliance report stated.
Ever since the report authorities have moved against piracy on several occasions, and earlier this month, Hungarian police carried out raids on four BitTorrent trackers including Bitlove, BitMusic and Indep, as well as other warez and spam sites. The police arrested up to ten individuals, eventually detaining six for further questioning.
The police targeted these websites specifically because they were not free. Members were expected to pay for access to the websites through premium SMS.
The operators of the site had ongoing conflicts with the operators of other free-to-use BitTorrent sites in the country because of the charging. Over 40 servers were confiscated in the end, filled with 250TB of data.