By Brooks Boliek -
WASHINGTON (Hollywood Reporter) - Federal law enforcement officers continued their crackdown on illegal copyright piracy as the U.S. departments of Justice and Homeland Security announced the first-ever criminal-enforcement action against BitTorrent network users Wednesday.
Agents of the FBI and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed 10 search warrants throughout the U.S. against leading members of a sophisticated peer-to-peer network known as Elite Torrents. Federal agents also took control of the main server that coordinated all file-sharing activity on the Elite Torrents network.
The raid, code-named Operation D-Elite, shut down one of the first peer-to-peer networks to post an illegal copy of "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith" before the movie officially opened in theaters May 19.
"Today's actions are bad news for Internet movie thieves and good news for preserving the magic of the movies," said Hollywood's top lobbyist, Dan Glickman, the president and CEO of the Motion Picture Assn. of America. "Shutting down illegal file-swapping networks like Elite Torrents is an essential part of our fight to stop movie thieves from stealing copyrighted materials. We hope and fully expect that people will spend this Memorial Day weekend sharing the motion picture experience with their families and not stealing movies from the Internet."
Elite Torrents received 8.5 million hits a day and was frequented by more than 100,000 users daily, the MPAA said. The site posted several thousand movie titles, including "House of Wax," "Kingdom of Heaven," "Unleashed," "Monster-in-Law," "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and "Kicking & Screaming." It also carried such television shows as the full seasons of "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost."
Operation D-Elite is being conducted jointly by ICE and the FBI as part of the Computer and Technology Crime High Tech Response Team (CATCH), a San Diego task force of specially trained prosecutors and law enforcement officers who focus on high-tech crime.
"Our goal is to shut down as much of this illegal operation as quickly as possible to stem the serious financial damage to the victims of this high-tech piracy," DOJ acting assistant Attorney General John Richter said. "Today's crackdown sends a clear and unmistakable message to anyone involved in the online theft of copyrighted works that they cannot hide behind new technology."
Federal and state member agencies of CATCH include ICE, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the San Diego District Attorney's Office, San Diego Police Department, the San Diego Sheriff's Department and San Diego County Probation.
The operation was coordinated and will be prosecuted by the DOJ's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, with the assistance and support of Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property coordinators in San Diego and U.S. Attorneys' Offices in Arizona, Illinois, Kansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin.
"Today's announcement makes clear that the federal government is committed to an aggressive, forward-thinking approach to the online theft of intellectual property," Recording Industry Assn. of America anti-piracy executive vp Brad Buckles said.
The raid came on the same day that senators heard from industry executives about the dangers posed internationally by copyright piracy.
Ray" director Taylor Hackford, testifying for the Directors Guild of America, told senators on the Judiciary Committee's intellectual property subcommittee that he is among those who have been victimized by piracy.
"I was fortunate with the movie 'Ray,"' he testified. "We had critical acclaim, and it did well at the theatrical box office and, importantly, even better with home video sales. My co-producer and the movie's distributor will make money on the picture, but that was not certain when the decision to invest was made."
Hackford said pirates camcorded the movie on the first day it was released at the Loews Raceway 10 in Westbury, N.Y., and at the Loews Jersey Garden Theater in Elizabeth, N.J.
"It was immediately put on the Web to be downloaded at a mass-production optical-disc plant in Russia, or in China, so within days of the film's release, copies of these stolen 'camcord editions' were found not only on (New York's) Canal Street but all over New York, California, Florida, Georgia, Texas -- and worldwide. . . . Just last week on May 19 through peer-to-peer networks, more than 476,000 requests were made to download 'Ray.' There have been 42 million such requests since my film was first pirated in October 2004. The Internet piracy of 'Ray' has been identified in 68 countries since that time. And that's just what we have data on."
Source: Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
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