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
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Lisa Minter (lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com)