TorrentFreak

Five men have been sentenced for their role in releasing pre-release copies of Hollywood movies onto so-called Internet ‘top sites’. A court handed out suspended sentences of between three and six months to individuals from two Internet release teams said to be responsible for causing Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal millions of dollars in damages. Together they will have to pay damages totaling more than 1.1 million euros.

During the first half of the last decade, people downloading movies from the Internet would very often be looking for the same things as they are now. They wanted movies that were only available officially in theaters but not only that, they wanted them in the absolute finest quality. There was one group that met all of these requirements, a group so influential that the FBI mounted a massive operation to catch them. That group was called Centropy.

Police in three European countries have carried out an operation to disrupt two scene release groups said to be responsible for pre-releasing thousands of movies onto the Internet. The action, which focused on datacenters and home addresses across Germany, Switzerland and Hungary, targeted the leaders and equipment of CRUCiAL and iNSPiRED.

Acting on information provided by an anti-piracy group, Swedish police have carried out raids and taken down at least one warez scene topsite. Items seized include at least a dozen computers and servers containing a conservative 200 terabytes of media, mainly Hollywood movies. As other sites get sucked into the fallout, the recriminations and finger-pointing have begun.

To many people the movie piracy Scene is something mythical or at least hard to comprehend. Who are these people who are the source for the majority of the pirated movies online? In a rare conversation, TorrentFreak had the chance to pick the brain of a former member of one of the world’s largest movie piracy groups, who speaks out about pride, ego, money and the changes that the Scene has gone through in recent years.

At the behest of Belgian authorities, two weeks ago police around Europe conduced coordinated raids on so-called Warez Scene topsites. Hailed as some of the most important raids of their type in recent memory, the action generated hundreds of headlines. But just how significant were the raids? To find out that, first we should look at how the Scene is organized.

Yesterday, police in 14 countries around Europe coordinated in raids against so-called Warez Scene topsites. Sweden, The Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, Great Britain, Czech Republic and Hungary all saw action. With the help of Scene insiders and other sources, today we try to piece together what happened, including which sites were hit and which ones got away.