Military Intelligence Used to Shutdown BitTorrent Site

[Grimlock]

http://torrentfreak.com/military-intelligence-used-to-shutdown-250k-user-bittorrent-site-090606/

This week police and anti-piracy groups moved to close down a very large BitTorrent tracker. With 250,000 users, Snowtigers was possibly the largest French tracker. According to reports, police arrested 10 members of staff and seized more than 20 servers, after the military assisted in locating the operators.

France. Land of romance, cheese and fine wines - and administrative base for one of the world's biggest semi-private BitTorrent trackers. Born in 2005, SnowTigers offered all the usual BitTorrent site content but being French, also carried links to home grown music and movies, a situation the authorities moved to end this week.

On Tuesday, police backed up by members of ALPA (Association Against Audiovisual Piracy) moved to close down SnowTigers, making 10 arrests in the Paris and Toulouse areas. According to Zataz, 21 servers were also seized.

France is becoming known as a country engaging in an increasingly aggressive fight against piracy and their enthusiasm seems to have gone through the roof in this case, with an ALPA spokesperson confirming that they had "worked very closely with the military" to locate the staff of the semi-private site.

The police and anti-piracy groups seem to be focused on the revenue generated by SnowTigers which they claim should have gone to the rights holders. ALPA president Frédéric Delacroix insisted that SnowTigers was a criminal organization. "The site has garnered several hundred thousand euros," he claimed.

As rumors persist that SnowTigers invitations were available to buy via various sources for around 30 euros each, while other users simply donated money to the site, Frédéric Delacroix of ALPA was keen to sow the seeds of doubt in their direction. "All people who have paid money [to the site] can now be questioned," he said.

Attacking the other major lifelines for any BitTorrent tracker - the releasers and heavy users - Delacroix hinted that there may be prosecutions around the corner for them too. "We are dealing with a truly international network," he said, adding "the investigation is not complete, it exceeds our French borders."

Indeed, according to Zataz, SnowTigers had other servers located outside France, namely at LeaseWeb in The Netherlands and Netelligent in Canada. The status of those servers is unclear.

Okay now things have begun to go TOO far for my taste.
I really hope that somebody is going to kick those anti-pirate idiots so hard that they will begin to see reason.

 

[Aught3]

Uh, how is this going to far? They shut down the servers that were set up to help people perform illegal activities and arrested the people who were in control of the network.

 

[Sando]

Haha, who would pay 30€ for an invitation to a tracker with 250 000 members? That's just silly...

Anyway, it's a bit silly actually. There's so many other things they could use the resources for than to go hunt down some servers when the tracker will just disappear and go abroad (just like TPB) where they can't reach them anyway.

 

[Grimlock]

The Whole War against Downloading fileshearing is in my opinion completely and utterly ridicules in SO many ways.

 

[ImprobableJoe]

Uh, how is this going to far? They shut down the servers that were set up to help people perform illegal activities and arrested the people who were in control of the network.

Sounds like a win to me! Hopefully a bunch of people go to jail for this.