Although the lax security in Hungary had been exploited for some time, the problem seemed to come to a head when a copy of Hangover Part II turned up online just after its premiere.

The copy of most interest to the international audience came from release group EP1C, who had spliced the video from the Hungarian language release with English language audio. The all-important video source had been supplied by release group CiNEDUB. According to the Hungarian government, that group are now in all kinds of trouble.

The National Tax and Customs Administration (NAV) say that in response to US pressure, its financial investigators and police have shut down “the largest pirate server center” in the country, which reportedly played a major role in the CiNEDUB group.

Dramatic video footage showed more than a dozen heavily armored and masked police and customs agents, some of them armed, smash down doors, make arrests and seize equipment. At one point the camera shows a shotgun on the floor of what appears to be a residential address. In another shot the camera homes in on a mirror, razor blade and what appears to be cocaine. Piles of money only add to the ‘Tony Montana’ effect.

The authorities say they seized 10 servers, 3 of which had a combined capacity of 70TB. They contained 5000 movies, 4000 songs , 6000 games and 500 pieces of software.

The government reports that access to the illegal material was being sold by a 9-man team using premium SMS payment systems and bank transfers. Two men are said to be under arrest and the rest are said to be “still at large.”

TorrentFreak spoke with SCT of ASVA, the leading local P2P blog, and asked if CiNEDUB stand accused of running the entire operation, a part of it, or whether they simply provided movies which were later exploited by the server operators. That remains unclear.

The government, however, are laying the blame firmly at CiNEDUB’s feet for attracting the ire of Hollywood.

“Most of this team were responsible for the great American filmmakers blacklisting Hungary,” NAV said in a statement.

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Over the past decade an awful lot of money has been spent trying to mitigate the problem. Intense lobbying in the United States has transformed camming into a serious felony and pressure on other countries, Canada in particular, has significantly reduced the number of copies from these traditional sources.

But of course, there are always others ready to take up the slack and it appears that in recent times that role has been filled by Hungarian pirates. This year, probably using secret watermarks, the major studios including Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. have been tracing copies of first-run movies back to local cinemas.

While the problem has existed for some time, a source familiar with the situation believes it came to a head recently when Hangover Part II turned up online just after its premiere. Videoed in a Hungarian cinema, this copy initially had fairly limited appeal due to its dubbed local language audio. But as usual, pirates have innovative tricks up their collective sleeves.

Due to tough legislation (not to mention tools such as night-vision goggles) camming usually proves very difficult, say, in the United States. However, recording just the sound from a movie onto a small portable device is not. So, armed with the video to Hangover Part II obtained by a Hungarian release group and a soundtrack easily culled from an English-language region, pirates connected to the P2P release group ‘EP1C’ spliced the pair together producing an end product with massive appeal.

This illicit release, added to the many others coming out of Hungary this year, appears to have caused Warner Bros to run out of patience. The studio has now announced that in order to stop piracy, for the foreseeable future their movies will not be released locally, on or even close to US release dates. In addition, Warner are said to have banned midnight screenings in Hungary altogether, presumably since these quieter times are more popular with cammers.

In recent months many of the key illicit copies, including Hangover Part II, have been made available by a Hungarian release group known as CiNEDUB. Keep an eye on this group for the rest of the year for an indication of whether or not Warner’s strategy is working.

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