One of those methods is known as Direct Connect, a hub-based ‘shared folder’ type system. Direct Connect hubs are more difficult to access than regular torrent sites but once in, users tend to share their entire collections, be they music or movie based. The index of all this material is shared between the users of the hub to show what is available and files can be accessed whenever the ‘owner’ of them is online. They can prove an absolute gold mine of data.

Unfortunately, as some users of Direct Connect in Sweden have discovered in recent months, proving large scale infringement against them is much easier than with BitTorrent. This has led to a number of arrests.

While Sweden has long been considered a relative hotbed for Direct Connect hubs, according to AIMR (Asociatia Industriei Muzicale din Romania) – Romania’s answer to the RIAA – their country is leading the world when it comes to Direct Connect.

According to information just released, this month parent group IFPI monitored a total of 913 active active hubs in Romania. In second place came Italy with 526, ahead of France, Russia, Hungary, Sweden, Finland and Poland. The United States came in at 10th place with just 143.

AIMR says that Romanian Direct Connect hubs have around 75,000 users at any one time, peaking to around 100,000 in the evenings and at the weekends. While these numbers may seems fairly low, the amounts being shared aren’t, with AIMR reporting that around 17,000 TB of data is being made available.

Since users generally only get hub access if they are prepared to offer media to the pool themselves, it means that nearly everyone is a significant provider of music and movies and therefore quite a big target for anti-piracy groups, especially when compared to BitTorrent users.

To this end, following an investigation in June, AIMR said it collected evidence against 40 ‘large scale’ users of Direct Connect hubs. In AIMR terms, this means people sharing more than 5,000 music tracks.

“In general, this means those who have shared more than 20 gigabytes of music, who have a constant presence online and are repeat users,” said AIMR’s Valeria Constantine in a statement.

“We identify them by IP address and then go to the police and each ISP to trace them to their homes. If it is proven that they uploaded music illegally then court proceedings can be initiated,” she added. “The whole process can take over a year.”

AIMR says it will send its evidence to the Fraud Investigation Service divisions of several police departments during July.

For those convicted of breaches of Art. 139, Legea Nr. 8/ 1996 (Article 139, Law no. 8 of 1996), there is a potential for harsh penalties – a maximum of 4 years in jail – but it’s unlikely anyone will be punished to that extent.

Last year saw the first case against a Romanian music file-sharer ending in the accused having to pay compensation of around $3,000 to AIMR. A second case this year ended in a similar manner.

AIMR hasn’t always successfully followed up on its anti-piracy warnings though. Following fears that The Pirate Bay might disappear after being bought by Hans Pandeya’s Global Gaming Factory, a complete copy of the site’s databases appeared online. BTArena created a clone of The Pirate Bay and was immediately threatened by AIMR with legal action. That site remains online today.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Then TorrentFreak got word from Alex, the admin of BTArena. He had downloaded the archive and spent quite some time putting all back together. “I made an online copy of The Pirate Bay,” he told us. The news flashed around the world and was covered by hundreds of news outlets – The Pirate Bay had been successfully cloned.

Then yesterday, quite unexpectedly, TorrentFreak received an email from AIMR (Asociatia Industriei Muzicale din Romania) – Romania’s answer to the RIAA.

We are Music Industry Association of Romania, and we represent the local labels for both romanian and international content. The website btarena.org (The Pirate Bay clone) is hosted in Romania and we already started the legal action against it.

Immediately we contacted Alex and asked him if he had a comment. He told us he knew of the legal action, but only because he’d read about it on a local news site.

According to AIMR, last Friday they contacted BTArena’s host and informed them about “illegal activity” and the ISP said it would pass on the notification.

It is worth noting that the backup of The Pirate Bay available via BTArena does not offer the full structure of The Pirate Bay. It is just an archive of TPB’s .torrent files and BTArena makes no attempt to track any of the torrents with its own tracker – that task is still being carried out by The Pirate Bay.

At the time of writing, BTArena.org is intermittently available and BTArena.net, the location for the TPB backup, is unavailable.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.