Anti-Piracy Group Say Police Have Arrested “Elite Pirate”

enigmax
March 9, 2011
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Anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån say police have arrested “an elite pirate” in Sweden. The man in his thirties is claimed to be an administrator of multiple ‘Scene’ servers carrying as many as 7,000 movies to which around 100 people had access. The man is said to have denied the charges but the prosecutor says his crimes could earn him a jail sentence.

Notorious anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån, who have been a thorn in the side of everyone involved in file-sharing from The Pirate Bay to the recently closed Swebits, are claiming another significant victory.

Yesterday, APB’s Henrik Pontén announced that following an investigation by his organization, last Friday police swooped on a man they believe to be a significant player in the so-called warez Scene.

“He is one of the elite pirates,” Pontén said. “It is good that the police have a broad focus in their work and can act against the advanced and illegal sources of BitTorrent users.”

The man, who is said to be around 30 years old, was arrested in the small city of Gävle by local police and specialists from Sweden’s anti-piracy unit.

“It was a major crackdown,” said Paul Pintér, Coordinator at the Intellectual Property Crime Department at Stockholm police.

Initial reports claimed that the man was the administrator of servers known in the Scene as ATHF which are said to host as many as 8,300 movies, TV shows and games. While access to the servers was naturally exclusive (APB reports that around 100 people had access), it is from servers like these that the wider file-sharing community obtains much of its material.

Frederick Ingblad from the Prosecutors Office said that the early allegations against the man “had been strengthened” following the examination of seized computer hardware.

“There were nearly 7000 films stored,” Ingblad said, adding that many films had been distributed either before or shortly after their premiere.

“In this case the offense involves so many movies that conviction could result in a prison sentence,” Ingblad added.

Throughout his interview the man is believed to have denied the charges.

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Katrina

do the crime – do the time – that is the risk you do when you enable people to steal!
- Anonymous
  
  That’s really desperate – not only are you refreshing TF every other minute so you can get your propaganda in as a “first post” but you’re going as far as to use a female alias to try and gain sympathy.
  
  Truly pathetic and as lame as the comparison of sharing being stealing.
  - Anonymous
    
    Tell ‘em Steve-Dave!
  - Anonymous
    
    Ah yes, attack the poster if you can’t attack their argument. Completely without basis too. See, *that* is truly pathetic.
    
    Besides, this story doesn’t fit in with the pirate sharing ideology – this is the scene. They’re *not* sharing, except outside of their little circle. It’s not like they’re distributing information and culture for the greater human good. The scene sucks.
- Anonymous
  
  Personally, as a rapist of women like Katrina. I think it is a good thing the police focusses on movies.
  - Phobophobia
    
    dark… but i kinda like this…
  - Ahoy
    
    Sick. I see the point you’re trying to make, but make it another way.
  - Stefeman
    
    Yeah, you made the point but that’s just so sick example.
  - Da-party-starter
    
    I lold
  - Iugeif
    
    Katrina is a tranny
  - Iugeif
    
    Katrina is a tranny
- George Bush Jr
  
  What’s a good movie I can download? Any recommendations?
  - Anonymous
    
    The Adjustment Bureau was pretty decent. Still just a TeleSync though…
  - Anon
    
    http://www.imdb.com/RandomTitle
  - http://twitter.com/ezee ezee
    
    Don’t download Green Hornet – was not worth the space it took up on my HDD :(
  - Guest
    
    Tron. But I’m waiting for the 720p h264 release. Xvid sucks so far.
    - Anonymous
      
      Search for the CHD 720p…
    - Guest
      
      Yeah thx, got it. Mad quality =)
      Totally recommended… by me!
    - puddi puddi
      
      it’s out now, I’m waiting for 1080p x264. Any minute now….
    - Guest
      
      Yeah, they came out at the same time. 720 and 1080
      You wanna look for this one: Tron?Legacy.2010.BluRay.1080p.DTS.x264-CHD.mkv
      
      And there’s also the bluray iso: TRON.Legacy.2010.1080p.3D.BluRay.AVC.DTS-HD.MA7.1-HDRoad.iso
      it’s only 47 GB LOL
  - http://crashsuit.blogspot.com crashsuit
    
    Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel. Also, The Room with Rifftrax. Also-also, The Aristocrats. If you have seen all three, we should hang out more.
- Anonymous
  
  lol?
- Voice_of_Reason
  
  Females read TF… Methink NOT! In Canada we have the same thing, the ruling Conservative party pays people to monitor the net and then propagate their “alternative point of view” on forums and even on FB.
  
  Problem is that they do it in such an obvious way (like so called Katrina did) that people only see it as propaganda and discount it as such.
  
  Well we now know where the industry spends their billions of profits!
  - Anonymiss
    
    “Females read TF… Methink NOT!”
    
    Yes we do.
    - jack.ss
      
      Sorry madam..
      We never see female nicks around – It’s nice with a Anonymiss around :)
    - DocGerbil100
      
      I think most of the contributors here are male, but not all of them. This is the internet and for all intents and purposes, there are no genders (unless the topic is a serious, non-perverse discussion of menstruation, in which case you can be 99.9% certain every contributor’s female).
    - jack.ss
      
      Thank you for stating the obvious :D
    - DocGerbil100
      
      Just trying to help out the Voices of Reason among us, for whom a grasp of the obvious seems to be an all too elusive ability. :)
    - Devanite
      
      I smell a poll coming up!??!!??!!??!!??!
      
      No really now I am interested in seeing numbers like that!
      
      Maybe age groups too
      As well as avg income
      and definetely pro/antipiracy positions!
    - Ninja
      
      Indeed! You can always lie on polls though. Still good to see women among us. Kinda refreshing ;)
    - Anonymon
      
      There are no women on the internet!
    - Anonymiss
      
      Expect us.
  - http://disqus.com/ Rob8urcakes
    
    To quote our dear departed Freddie Mercury of Queen -
    “Honey! I’m more female than you. And more male than you can ever be.”
    
    But that sorta detracts a little from the main thrust of the argument that police are arresting people for having a copy of Bugs Bunny.
    And such ludicrous actions by the authorities MUST cease before we have to teach our kids how to make bombs again.
    - Anonymous
      
      “And such ludicrous actions by the authorities MUST cease before we have to teach our kids how to make bombs again.”
      
      WTF?
- Haxor
  
  WHOT im arrested LOL im right here or am i there …l33t indeed
Bob

Maybe use a site like imdb and look at the top 250 movies or search by genrre, or best films of 2005 say via google or metacritic.
Momo

The elite pirate was quoted as saying “Yaarrr me hearties, I be sent to Davy Jones locker.” before attempting to kick our reporter in the groin with his peg leg.
Voice_of_Reason

Arresting 1 guy every six months… At this rate, the industry should have cleansed the interwebz of all its pirates around the year 1,002,010… (one million and two thousand ten). This would be true if pirates would refrain from reproducing.

My guess is that, in one million years, the next step will be for the industry to start tackling the “intergalactic illegal file sharing problem”…
- http://disqus.com/ Rob8urcakes
  
  With fond memory (and feel free to slap my bare bottom for being off-topic) but your comment made my ears fill with Cap’n Kirk’s demented stare at the green-screen while shouting, “Fire all phasers. All banks. Full power!”
  
  Then the target simply cloaks, but reappears a few seconds later with additional Klingons on the starboard bow ….
- Devanite
  
  Awww you mean i cannot reproduce, but I wannnnnnaaaaaaaaa waaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!
  
  Oh wait thats optional, PHEW!
Anonymous

h ponten is a fucking joke….
Violated

The scene is under attack again so nothing new there.

Plenty of people always willing to take their place and meet the demand.

One thing I dont get is why he did not keep all his HDDs encrypted? Easy to do and unauthorized means no mounted drives and only passphrase request.

Best of all you can have instant key revoke to lock them forever. Wire in extra technology and you can force dismount or key revoke from anywhere.

Someone needs to upgrade their security.
- phil
  
  or for LUKS, a nice command should render that entire partition useless…
  
  head -c 1052672 /dev/zero > /dev/sde1; sync
  
  they would have nothing against him. hmmm wouldn’t you think anyone in the scene would be that smart?
  - Ninja
    
    Just cause the server had tons of Scene releases it doesn’t mean they were from any Scene group. It’s like terrorism, you can blame your generic sore thumb in some generic Al Qaeda terrorist whenever you want and expect massive propaganda will eventually lead ppl to believe bovinely in you and spread the fear around.
    
    But then again, it’s good to share self-protection methods ;)
Guest

It’s so good to see that so much is done to track down and prosecute those highly dangerous criminals. We can’t let them steal all that great work that the movie and music industries provide us with. If it wasn’t for pirates all those great movies from the past 10, 20 years would have so much more revenue, and we would get even more highly intellectual material from which people could learn so much.

Sure, rapists, robbers, murderers, pedophiles, child abusers, drug dealers etc. are giving the society and the people a hard time, but it’s nothing compared to that pirate scum. They ruin the lives of so many people in the industry. We can’t let this go on any longer. Pirates are destroying the world with providing great material for free. If this continues the rich won’t be able to pay their bills any longer. It has to stop. Focus your efforts and resources in tracking down pirates, it’s the only way we can rid this world of evil.
- Mr Sarcasm
  
  Actually there wouldn’t be any deaths for starvation or any other problem if there were no pirates since MPAA/RIAA companies and the likes would generate one billion gazillion dollars more and would generously distribute around. It’s a goal worth pursuing even if you have to ruin lives of moms, grandpas/grandmas, kids, [b]printers[b] and so on in the process.
  - Zero
    
    without even looking at your name i realised that your post was meant sarcastically, but when i saw what you posted under that name i couldn’t refrain from just a brief chuckle.
    
    but really if we dont know what website this guys server belonged to i certainly cant make any comment.
  - Zero
    
    without even looking at your name i realised that your post was meant sarcastically, but when i saw what you posted under that name i couldn’t refrain from just a brief chuckle.
    
    but really if we dont know what website this guys server belonged to i certainly cant make any comment.
Anonymous

Wow, you would think those cops would have enought REAL crime to deal with. Wow.
privacy-tools.cz.tc
Anonymous

Wow, you would think those cops would have enought REAL crime to deal with. Wow.
privacy-tools.cz.tc
- We Hate Spam
  
  When are TF going to ban containing ‘privacy-tools’? It’s not used in any other context after all, only for this cnuts spam.
  - I Am An Idiot
    
    It was said before, just flag it for review and don’t reply. If you reply it won’t be entirely deleted.
Guest

“The man is said to have denied the charges but the prosecutor says his crimes could earn him a jail sentence.”

When criminals (the corporate parasites and their accomplices such as this prosecutor) start calling the innocents people criminal it is time to take our guns and do some clean up.
Predator

“(APB reports that around 100 people had access)”
My god! they catched the pirate in chief! 100 people? 7000/ movies?
Whoo! that’s a lot of people and a lots of movies. . . .

NOT!

I am sharing 18000 movies, 50,000 people a month.

Try to get me!
Predator

“(APB reports that around 100 people had access)”
My god! they catched the pirate in chief! 100 people? 7000/ movies?
Whoo! that’s a lot of people and a lots of movies. . . .

NOT!

I am sharing 18000 movies, 50,000 people a month.

Try to get me!
wildfire

for everone that they get two or more step up to the plate, i guess it looks good and a they get a bonous for this, yes i have your emails, you can’t even protect yourself this is why you don’t want to name your names out. its lets you charge more and keeps you in a job. get real movie and music people and fix your outdated system and make money off of it instead of fighting it, as you profiles show you could but you are hard headed and don’t want to change, disney channel is creating them as fast as they grow up, don’t beleive me then check it out people and yes they know it.
Pingback: Digest for 3/9 | Stuck in a Digital-Haze
Nah

The guy is smart, don’t talk without a lawyer and deny everything.

If the guy was good, they wont be able to find any evidence, or not have the technical competence to get it. Let it play out.
Fsdfsd

“100 people had access.”

“Arrested Elite Pirate”

I connect easily to more people than that and share to thousands, this is nothing but a PR stunt.

./yawn
Foff

7000 movies? I find that a little hard to believe. I know of no torrent site that has anywhere near that amount of movies available. You can find multiple copies of recent movies but finding copies of movies that are even a year or two old that are seeded can be difficult. Sure some action flicks, and Sci-fi series are always available off and on and the Disney rerelease of the month can always be found but I know of no site where a library of thousands of well seeded flicks can be found. So may be there are servers with everything that was shared over the last five years but currently only a small fraction is actually shared at any given moment.

The local library has thousand or two movies that can be checked out anytime so what is the big deal. Can’t industry get over the idea that a library has to be a brick and mortar place run by the government. What is wrong with a private online library?
- Anonymous
  
  It’s not about a torrent site. They will very likely be FTP servers.
- Researcher
  
  Learn to search, I’ve just downloaded a 12 yr old movie.
Duke

This is getting old. TPB has been shut down many times before, and has always come back.

Everyone should watch ‘Steal this Film’. It is a documentary about the torrent community, The Pirate Bay, and the future of media sharing.
Anonymoose

heh good to see that noobs are still largely unaware of where the majority of the stuff they download comes from…
Foff

Very few get access to these type of ftp’s and those that do don’t have unlimited hard drive space so just like in a library where some books are checked out all the time and others collect dust some movies will get widely shared while the majority of others will hardly get shared at all.

In the article in said some were distributed before or shortly after the premier. First it is usually big news if any movie is distributed before it is release so doubt any were distributed prior to release and second if they were distributed shortly after release then they were crappy cams or telecines and if that is the case then this guy is just a small fish in a long line of distributers,

The case according to the facts presented is very weak. Just possesion of the movies does not prove how much if and distribution was done. You would have to monitor this guy over a long period of time to prove how much if any sharing was done. At most he might get a couple of months and be slapped with some ridiculous fine he will never be able to pay.
- Server Admin
  
  Two things:
  
  “Making available”
  
  “Server logs”
- Borderliner
  
  Aren’t the camming guys the foremost front of the Scene? Those who actually sneak a camcorder into the theatre, capture the sound, sync them together and clean up the markers from video that could reveal which theatre the incident took place? After all – the (official) big hype is still the box office from the cinema and that is exactly what those releasing CAMs/TS’s affect.
Gnarledreaper

Intellectual property crime unit at the police department? really?

What a waste of money and resources.
- Devanite
  
  I need to create a company funded by the government that employs people to print things, shred them, recycle things and refill our printers…
  
  THATS IT WHO WANTS TO GIVE THIER LIVES MEANING AND COME WORK FOR ME :D
Guest

I sense a great disturbance in the force – as if millions of file-sharers cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
- Devanite
  
  No, not really!
BuRnCycL

This is why all Scene members (or anyone running linux) should store their warez in an encrypted mount point (i.e. truecrypt), and keep the keys off site (remote key download with a bash script). It’s also wise to not keep logs or setup a system to delete logs (accomplished with a bash script and a cronjob or logrotate). You can even store the logs in the encrypted mount point.

If the man ever tries to confiscate your equipment, they will be damned to find evidence. I also recommend using encryption for all transmissions (RC5) and blacklists to filter the man (moblock).

Don’t let this happen to you. The tools exist….Good luck safe guarding your equipment.
Uhhhhm

Its shitty how they are on this “anti piracy” crusade. They are a little late on trying to control their content on a world wide scale.
- DocGerbil100
  
  Yes. It brings to mind my favourite aphorism: “the avalanche has started – it is too late for the pebbles to vote”. :)
qunt in a suit

I wish I was an elite pirate.
Borderliner

So those are the numbers on Scene servers? Somehow I expected them to be higher. 8300 movies and 100 people who could access them (or were these “accounts” which were shared by a number of people?).

Anyway, glad to hear that he denies the charges. It seems to be more common to give in without a second thought and blead guilty and/or rat out everyone you know…

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Anti-Piracy Group Say Police Have Arrested “Elite Pirate”

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