Police Raid University, Dismantle P2P Network
Police 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.
