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Italian police close down "Italy's Pirate Bay"
11:24 | Tuesday July 29, 2008
Colombo-BT.org, the largest BitTorrent tracker site in Italy, has been closed down.
The site was run by three Italian men, who have been charged with infringing copyright law and face potential prison terms of up to three years and heavy fines.
The operation, which helped users find and exchange the computer files they want on peer-to-peer networks, was funded by accepting online donations from users.
Italian police, who worked alongside IFPI-associated Italian anti-music piracy group FPM on the case, closed the service, seizing computers and freezing two bank accounts.
FPM president Enzo Mazza compared the site to notorious filesharing service The Pirate Bay. “Colombo-BT.org was Italy’s version of The Pirate Bay,” he says.
“Its operators deliberately facilitated availability of copyright infringing content to line their own pockets. The gang of three now face potential prison sentences and hefty fines as a result of their activities. This police action sends a strong message that Italy will not tolerate serious online music piracy so criminals looking for get rich quick schemes should consider other options.”
Readers' comments
Good!! Music piracy is killing the scene. I always pay, why should people sit in studios for hours, days, months even years writing music for some nock-off nigel to come along and download it for free in poor quality not doing the artists, the track, the industry any justice.
This is great! they need to crack down on piracy!
Hold on...the site was kept afloat by donations and not advertising. Unless the users were awfully generous, it's extremely unlikely that the site's operators "lined their pockets". Now I know nothing about Italy's copyright infringement laws and whether or not they'd actually be up for a prison sentence, but torrent distribution is never a profitable venture unless there's significant advertising revenue involved. Something is fishy about the details (or lack thereof) in this story.
So one goes down and a few more will pop up. The hydra never dies. IFPI can declare a victory, but taking down torrent sites will not fix a social problem.
Scene releases aren't poor quality. Where have you been? Anyway the money given to these admins was donated, so this line their pockets crap is stupid. I'd be surprised if the Italian gov't didn't just seize their assets because they could get away with it. If you want to help out artists, go to concerts and buy direct. Going to brick and mortars and buying CDs is for chumps. Apple, for instance, would disagree with the notion that *anything* is "killing the scene".
This won't stop other sites from appearing. P2P has to be embraced!