MPAA strikes in Europe, targets search engines

eDonkey network downed
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Published Friday 24th February 2006 08:16 GMT

The Motion Picture Ass. of America has struck in Europe - forcing the closure of what it described as the largest eDonkey P2P file sharing network.

The Razorback2 network, with over a million users at any one time, was hosted at Zaventem, near Brussels, and Swiss police arrested its owner.

"We are very grateful to the Swiss and Belgian authorities for their cooperation and effective action in dealing with this particularly egregious enterprise and the individual profiting from it," said Chris Marcich of the MPAA's European office, in a canned statement.

The MPAA followed up today with a new barrage of lawsuits aimed at nine more file sharing services, including search engines.

These include Usenet hosts NZB-Zone.com, BinNews.com and DVDRs.net; eDonkey network Ed2k-It.com; and five BitTorrent indexing sites owned by one individual.

The latter told website Slyck he had yet to be been notified of the action.

The usual course of action for copyright holders has been to request that major search engines such as Google comply with a DMCA take down notice.

ISOHunt has a copyright policy which states that "... our automated indexing cannot discriminate copyrighted or non-copyrighted works", and says that it complies with DMCA notices. ®

Source: theregister.com
More info: Slyck News