Italian and Mexican File-Sharing Hubs Shut Down by Police

What may be the largest BitTorrent tracker file-sharing hub in Italy has been taken down by the Italian police. The tracker in question is Colombo-BT.org, and the information came from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), a record label trade group.

Allegedly the site was offering links to more than 390,000 music files and 500,000 movie files, and had over 400,000 registered users.The three Italian administrators of the site have been accused of copyright infringement, and beside from receiving some burning fines, they could be sent to jail for up to three years.

The raid was conducted by Italy's Guardia di Finanza with the assistance of the FPM, the Italian anti-music piracy group affiliated with IFPI.

The IFPI has recently scored another success with a law enforcement action in Mexico where it closed down "Sunnydale," a DirectConnect file-sharing hub the group claimed was housing 1.5 terabytes of illegal material, among which local and international music, games and comics. The one to supply the information that led to the Mexican Attorney Generals' Office action was the local industry anti-piracy group – APCM Mexico.