Digital Piracy Raids Net Arrests
Law enforcement officials in 11 countries swooped in on more than 20 groups accused of being key suppliers of pirated goods online, arresting four people and seizing computers stuffed with bootlegged movies, games and software.
The Wednesday raids, dubbed "Operation Site Down" by the U.S. Department of Justice, targeted high-level "warez" groups, the secretive online communities that obtain and distribute pirated computer programs and other digital goods.
"This is the very top of the online piracy pyramid," said John Malcolm, a former Justice Department official who leads the Motion Picture Assn. of America's anti-piracy efforts. Evidence seized should lead investigators to more groups, he said, and many others should be deterred by the prospect of serving "serious jail time."
A new federal law sets penalties of up to 10 years in prison for anyone caught distributing a movie or song before its commercial release.
But the Justice Department's crackdown is unlikely to make a deep dent in rampant global piracy, where new sources of bootlegged goods quickly emerge to replace those that dry up. "It'll shut people down for a couple of weeks, then they'll come back," said Bruce Forest of MediaHounds, an anti-piracy firm specializing in high-level warez sites.
The raids were the latest in a series of moves this week that raised the stakes for individuals who swap copyrighted goods online and the businesses that support them.
On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that two well-known file-sharing networks could be sued for inducing piracy, and on Wednesday a federal jury for the first time convicted someone of criminal copyright infringement for recording movies with a video camera in a theater. Meantime, the major record labels continued their campaign of suing individual users of file-sharing networks, filing lawsuits against 784 people suspected of infringing copyrights.
Pressed hard by entertainment and software companies, the Justice Department has launched three major international assaults on warez groups since 2000. This week's operation -- which included raids in Europe, Australia and Israel -- was the product of three separate undercover investigations by FBI agents in San Jose, Chicago and Charlotte, N.C.
According to the Justice Department, agents raided more than 70 sites in the United States and more than 20 others abroad. The raids shut down at least eight online distribution points for pirated goods, some of which had been created during the course of the investigation.
