Police Raid University, Dismantle P2P Network
Written by enigmax on April 20, 2007Police in Poland have mounted an operation against a DirectConnect network situated within a university campus. Officers dismantled the operation following claims of students trading large quantities of unauthorized music, films and software.
On Wednesday, police officers assisted by ZPAV, the Polish arm of the IFPI and FOTA (equivalent to the MPAA in Poland) conducted a raid on the campus of the 18,500-student Koszalin University of Technology after reports that students were sharing large quantities unauthorized media via the university network.
The students were using DirectConnect - a P2P file-sharing protocol where users connect to a central hub which carries a list of other users on the network and an index of available downloads. This enables users to search for the data they would like and directly send it to each other.
Items seized in the raid include one main PC running the DC++ hub software, 10 laptops and 60 hard drives. A total of 35,000GB of movies, music and software was reportedly available to download from the network.
The three administrators of the hub were all students at the university and were taken into custody.
The Polish music industry does not seem to be going after the casual file-sharer but is instead concentrating its efforts on targeting hub admins and major uploaders. In the last 6 months, ZPAV claims to have caught 267 uploaders, offering a total of 778,000 music tracks for download on file-sharing networks.
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18 Responses
“all students at the university, were taken into custody. ”
“a raid on the campus of the 18,500-student ”
18.5k people under custody?
@1
unless your comment was intended as a joke: your reading comprehension = F
The three administrators of the hub - all (three that are themself) students at the university,
From the view of polish law, this raid was illegal, because there was no permission to do the raid, and head of the university wasn’t aware of it and wasn’t with the police during this event.
How the *** did they find out?
Is there any fully decentralized LAN filesharing program that could be used to make this less likely?
This completely sucks.
I used to live in Enschede, an a similar thing happened on our University campus there. The organization responsible (Brein, Holland) for the raids was heavily criticized, and if you ask me, it was part of it’s ending.
They’re still going, but with nothing but bullying left as a technique to scare filesharers, I guess it’s not long till they will face their first harrassment lawsuit.
Let’s hope for Poland it will develop something like this.
If the previous poster was right, then I would make sure to start a comittee of some kind to NOT get your rights squashed right there.
thanks englishteacher ;)
Is anyone else thinking ‘what the fuck’ as in a commercial entity (eg MPAA / RIAA) is assisting Police at the scene. The possibility of ‘plants’ etc is huge.
Give the evidence to the police, they go in.
It’s like the RIAA handled all sorts of evidence when they went in with the Police. Unbelievable
@4:
For closed groups sharing things, waste would be ideal imho. Plus the traffic is encrypted, so it probably couldn’t be throttled.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE
For a small group sharing files on the campus lan that’s a good solution.
35,000 GB (35 terabytes) on 60 hard drives ? Either they all had 750gb drives or someone got the numbers wrong… or maybe even made them up ? :P Surely the media cartels would never lie about such things. (/sarcasm)
I think the big problem here is that they were using university resources (bandwidth) to run it. If it had been a stricly internal network between friends/roommates, they would have been fine. Opening their network to strangers on the internet is what let the snitches in, like MediaSentry and the various other shell companies the media cartels “employ” to find offenders.
@ Billco
They captured 60 Hard Drives but in total, there were many people on the network which amounted to 35,000 gb worth of data/movies. (Each having their own hard drive per pc/laptop).
No one got their numbers wrong. You just got your common sense %%%%ed up!
My compliments to the authorities of Poland, don’t take down the house mother and children who don’t know its illegal to share 1 file, since everyone does it.
Taking down the die-hard uploaders is far more effective. And of course the sources of such uploaders, like the network mentioned.
Not that I support the reason they do it, missed income and infringement of the copyrights. Since this kind of material is hold hostage from honest people with high profits and less money for the people working in the music.business.
jebać policje!!!!!!!!!!
zawsze i wszedzie…policja jebana bedzie…;] / zawsze po drugiej stronie barykady… :)
hehe…
Mamy tradycje, je*** policjÄ™!
[quote comment="87584"]“all students at the university, were taken into custody. ”
“a raid on the campus of the 18,500-student ”
18.5k people under custody?[/quote]
no, only 3 people were in custody.
what they ment is: out of the 3 administrators, not just 2 or 1 went to uni, but ALL of the 3 admins went to uni, and they were ALL (the 3 admins that is) were taken to custody
your an idiot there is no comma..learn english
jest dobrze jest dobrze jest w krakowie :]
I Think,Ä°t is very nice information…
Hitchhiker Nation
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