European Pirates Arrested in Massive Police Operation 278
freedumb2000 writes "Europe just witnessed one of the largest piracy-related busts in history with the raid of the popular movie streaming portal Kino.to. More than a dozen people connected to the site were arrested after police officers in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands raided several residential addresses and data centers. Kino.to hosted no illicit content itself, but indexed material stored on file-hosters and other streaming services."
Summary incomplete (Score:5, Interesting)
Copying and pasting the first paragraphn is 1) misleading 2) an extremely poor way to do a SUMMARY. This is what is missing "GVU states that Kino.to was working closely with the sites that hosted the copyrighted films, and that they profited from commercial partnerships with these companies."
So it was not a SIMPLE linking as the first paragraph make seem to believe.
kino.to was a cesspit (Score:4, Interesting)
Download and raw DVD tax (Score:5, Interesting)
More than a dozen people connected to the site were arrested after police officers in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands raided several residential addresses and data centers.
Spain has a tax on empty CDs/DVDs. Wasn't the justification for that to be that it would make non-profit piracy tolerated? (In my country, Hungary we have a similar tax, and it protects users of pirate sites.) This is the first time I hear that users of pirate sites are also prosecuted in Europe. What next, bittorrent users? (Like with Hurt Locker in US.)
And Geeks Bit the Heads Off Chickens (Score:4, Interesting)
The "Waah Waah Content Pirates aren't Pirates, they don't have ships or parrots!" whine is even more tedious than the "Hackers are computer hobbyists, and not necessarily bad!" screed.
Language evolves (c.f., the original meaning of "geek" in the subject here).
I first heard the use of the word "pirate" in this modern context to refer to the people who were stealing satellite signals from premium cable TV networks back in the '70s, pre-dating popular Internet usage by around 15 years. Get over yourselves and move on.