Piratetorrents.nu, formerly one of Sweden’s largest private BitTorrent communities, has shut down fearing the authorities may come after them. The abrupt decision comes a few weeks after police in Sweden and Germany raided the XNT.nu BitTorrent tracker and arrested two of the alleged operators of the site.
Police in two countries have coordinated to close down a 30,000 torrent private BitTorrent tracker. The operation, which spanned Sweden and Germany, closed down XNT.nu, a site which had risen through the ashes of other sites shut down by authorities in 2009. Police have arrested two suspected administrators and seized the site’s server.
Source: Police Raid ‘Excellent’ Private BitTorrent Tracker, Admins Arrested
As part of a file-sharing investigation, in 2010 authorities tracked an IP address to a house in Sweden. After a night playing video games a blurry-eyed house sitter answered the early morning call only to be welcomed by the police. They weren’t looking for him, but the owner who was abroad. Sometimes, however, you can be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Source: IP Address Leads Police To World’s Unluckiest File-Sharer
After their former hosting provider received an injunction telling it to stop providing bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, the worlds most resilient BitTorrent site switched to a new ISP. That host, the Swedish Pirate Party, made a stand on principle. Now they aim to take things further by running the site from inside the Swedish Parliament.
Following investigations carried out by the IFPI, police carried out several raids across Sweden yesterday, targeting individuals sharing thousands of music tracks via Direct Connect. The alleged operator of the hub was arrested while others admitted to copyright infringement offenses.
IFPI Sweden are celebrating after new statistics reveal that in 2009, music sales were up for the first time in nearly a decade. Digital sales have increased rapidly, with revenues from streaming services such as Spotify increasing impressively. Even physical CD sales showed a modest increase over the previous year.
