The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

MPAA strikes in Europe, targets search engines

eDonkey network downed

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. ®

Free Download - The Reg Guide to Extended Validation

Don’t Miss

email symbolStill sending naked email? Get your protection here

Security How-to Buckle your seatbelt, encrypt your bits

Google's Satan phoneT-Mobile G1 Google Android-based smartphone

Review Operating System 1, Hardware 0

Ubuntu teaser Ubuntu 8.10 - All Hail new Network Manager

Review The good kind of UI theft

OpenOffice_logoOpenOffice 3.0 - the only option for masochistic Linux users

Review And linear optimizing Mactards