Piracy Abound

The IFPI said that the research institute Czech Academy of Sciences was recently the unwitting host of a server that powered one of the largest pre-release music archives in the world, and with the help of Czech police, the server and its 4TB of data has been shut down. The site is temporarily out of business.

The Academy of Sciences is a group of 7,000 scientists doing basic research that is funded by the Czech government, but the IFPI says that the Blind Alley server was owned by a private group simply renting space in an Academy data center. It had a fast line to the Internet and served several release groups that specialize in throwing up copies of unreleased music. The IFPI says the server was "one of the most powerful" it has ever shut down.

The IFPI has spearheaded several such high-profile raids in recent months, focusing more on major servers than on individual downloaders. Last October, with the help of UK police, the invite-only OiNK tracker was closed. At the time, the IFPI called it the "primary source worldwide for illegal prerelease music," but it was far from the only one. Major trackers like Canada's Demonoid were busted, and Polish police even shut down servers in Wroclaw.

The major labels don't really have much choice but to adopt this strategy, even though it's a bit like playing Whac-A-Mole. Last July, the EU's top court, the European Court of Justice, ruled that ISPs did not need to disclose subscriber information in civil copyright infringement lawsuits. The ruling was validated by the court in January, and it took the RIAA’s "sue-'em-all" strategy off the table in Europe.

Now there seems to be a new stategy. First, the music business is going after the biggest hubs it can find, hoping to make the process of finding free music just difficult enough so that the vast majority of people won't bother.

Second, the record labels are pushing hard for some sort of ISP filtering and disconnection of repeat offenders; France and the UK are working on such schemes right now.

But the second approach is drawing increasing opposition on the continent where German prosecutors have already declared noncommercial file-swapping a "petty offense." Just a few weeks ago, the European Parliament weighed in on the issue of disconnecting users from the Internet for copyright infringement, and it rejected such plans

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