German Police Shut Down Private Torrent Tracker
The battle against P2P file sharing has a lot of facets – while on the abstract ground of law the repeat file sharers have reasons to rejoice (as the European Parliament dismissed the notion of ‘three strikes’ policy), on the concrete ground of the piracy combat authorities engage in rapid raids to caught the pirates red-handed. In one such raid German authorities have terminated a private BitTorrent tracker this week and confiscated lots of PCs, HDDs, DVDs, CDs and money.
In the official statement (having the participation of the German anti-piracy group GVU), the authorities said: "Members of the file sharing networks were able to buy download packages for up to 75 Euros. Users who paid 100 Euros or more received special privileges."
As P2Pblog accurately observes after a short investigation – this so called great success against piracy may be called just as well a major waste of taxpayer money and time. Why? Well, the tracker was only serving up about 300 torrents. Now, if you compare it to The Pirate Bay’s approximately 2 million listed torrents there’s not much to comment, is there? Of course, some could probably say that the aforementioned site is a public tracker and there’s no room for comparison but, nevertheless, the majority of large private trackers list around 15000 torrents at any given time so that still kind of cuts back on the ‘success’.
