BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy outfit, has announced the complete shutdown of a torrent site “franchise hierarchy” that were all run by an individual who went under the name “Topspinner.”
Last month the outfit took action against 75 torrent sites, each of which used similar templates and charged a fee on sign up. That fee allowed users to download all they want for a certain period of time.
During the initial raids however, the individual in charge managed to slip away but BREIN has now identified and summoned “Topspinner.”
“The owner of the sites which almost all were registered under the alias Topspinner stayed in hiding after the Dutch take down and moved a number of his sites to a German hosting provider. After summons to the German provider, the sites ran to France and Belgium, and finally, after further summons, to Denmark. In meantime BREIN identified the 45 year old man from the Dutch town of Oudenbosch and summoned him yesterday,” said BREIN in a statement.
Result for: hierarchy
The IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) has announced that they have successfully raided two servers in Hungary that were home to the very popular music release group RAGEMP3.
The announcement also said that the raid disrupted another music release group, XXL. The raid was a joint action by the IFPI, Hungarian police, and ProArt (the local copyright traffic police).
No arrests have been made and the announcement said nothing about any long term consequences for the release groups. Most likely the organizations are nowhere near decimated and its possible that the servers were not the only ones used by the groups.
The release groups, otherwise known as top sites, are “the top tier hierarchy of the online distribution world.” It is where releases begin and the point from which information “trickles” down to torrent sites, newsgroups, Warez forums and finally P2P.
