Greek authorities have taken down the large torrent tracker Gamato.info, accusing the site of facilitating copyright infringement of music, games, movies, and books.
Six admins of the site were also arrested in raids of their homes in Athens, Salonika, Larissa and Aridaia.
The police officials were working on tips from IFPI Greece, the local branch of the industry group.
Gamato.info was a top 20 most visited site in Greece, with an estimated 155,000 daily visitors. The site had around 13,000 movies, 6500 games and over 35,000 music albums available.
Says Jeremy Banks, director of anti-piracy at IFPI: “Gamato.info was facilitating the illegal distribution of music, film, games and books. It is the perfect illustration of how such illegal operations are damaging a wide range of creative industries in Europe. The Hellenic Police swiftly recognized this was not a victimless crime and took action against those who sought to shamelessly profit off the back of others’ creative work. This skilfully executed action by a highly knowledgeable police force should act as a real deterrent to others in Greece considering engaging in online piracy.”
Result for: torrent tracker
In March, the founders of the giant public torrent tracker The Pirate Bay announced their plans to release a virtual private network (VPN), allowing for users to browse the Internet anonymously.
This morning I received an email stating the service has gone live. Says the email:
A while ago you showed an interest in our VPN service, Ipredator (www.ipredator.se)!
The service was at that time in a beta phase and we hope that you got a chance to use the service already. If not, we would like to tell you that it’s now open for everyone!
For only 149 SEK (that’s about 15 EUR / 21 USD) per 3 months you will get safe, encrypted communication between you and the internet, with no logging of the data transferred. It’s of our utmost concern that you can use the network without anyone deciding what you’re can communicate about.
Ipredator is not only another VPN-service. It’s also a statement. Right now we’re developing a new tool to make it harder (or impossible) for the government of Sweden to tap into their citizens traffic. Our goal is making people have the ability to use their democratic rights, without a fear of repression.
So, the more people that actually use the service, the better. We will get funds to build more tools and at the same time the users clearly show that they want to be anonymous. It sends a very clear message to the politicans!
Please invite your friends if they need a service like Ipredator, and tell people about the reasons why they should be allowed to communicate without a third party listening to their conversations… The most important thing is to actually make people aware of the situation.
Result for: torrent tracker
Anti-piracy outfit BREIN has proudly announced this week that it shut down 393 torrent sites in 2009, with the largest being massive indexer Mininova, which was forced to go legal.
Overall, the group shut down 615 “illegal websites,” with the good majority being torrent trackers.
Additionally, 35 eD2K servers were taken down, 38 streaming movie stires, and 14 NZB (Usenet portals) were part of the group.
TF is reporting that the sites taken down must be very, very small since they received “a grand total of zero emails requesting information on the other several hundred closures.” (Not including Mininova, TorrentVault)
As is always the case with torrent site shutdowns anyway, one goes down and at least one new one goes up to take its place.
