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Big Swedish Filesharing Server Seized 423

SmugJerk writes "Authorities are continuing to apply pressure on Sweden's filesharing community amid the trial of several principals of The Pirate Bay filesharing site. Today they seized a fileserver containing about 65 terabytes of files, corresponding to around 16,000 full-length movies."
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Big Swedish Filesharing Server Seized

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  • Note the spin... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08, 2009 @05:54AM (#27110929)

    ...major crackdown...

    ...one of the biggest pirate server confiscations ever ...

    ...international pirate network...

    The same spin doctors that run the drug war are now being employed in the Imaginary Property war.

    BTW. Despite the word association games the article plays, there is no comparison between a server containing 65TB of files and Pirate Bay, as Pirate Bay doesn't contain any copyrighted information that isn't supposed to be there.

    • by Renderer of Evil ( 604742 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:02AM (#27110953) Homepage

      The same spin doctors that run the drug war are now being employed in the Imaginary Property war.

      Pretty much. Law enforcement always does this by putting the drugs in dollar figures. "1 million dollars worth of cocaine" sounds much more impressive than 2 kilos of powder.

      • Re:Note the spin... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Reality Master 301 ( 1462839 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:20AM (#27111023)
        That's because "1 million dollars worth of cocaine" would be around 30 kilos at the current price.
        • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08, 2009 @07:06AM (#27111239)
          Not in police fantasy accounting, where the value of that 2 kilos is determined by how much could be got by splitting it in to 1/10 gram rocks and selling them at the highest street price of ~$25, which would mean 4 kilos would be worth 1 million dollars. I'm not kidding.
          • Re:Note the spin... (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Pax681 ( 1002592 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @08:09AM (#27111483)
            the police here in the UK do the exact same. they value cannabis resin by saying it costs £5 GBP per gram when in fact an ounce(28 grams) will cost you £30-50 GBP. it's a bullshit PR based accounting system based on prices from yesteryear and not based in modern reality.
            • by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) * on Sunday March 08, 2009 @09:05AM (#27111755) Journal

              Yes,

              "The street value of the movies seized in this raid was estimated at 800 trillion dollars. According to the RIAA, for every movie shared on The Pirate Bay, seven film studio executives commit suicide, and twenty-three copyright lawyers buy Jaguars."

              Can we get pictures of the brave Swedish Authorities who conducted this dangerous pre-dawn raid?

          • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

            by fugue ( 4373 )

            Interesting. Is that what Wall Street economists do as well?

            Speaking of, if you're buying cocaine, please, for the sake of our economy, buy US-made stuff. Doing Mexican cocaine is unpatriotic.

            "Unless you're Mexican, you insensitive clod"?

        • by CarpetShark ( 865376 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @01:17PM (#27113211)

          1 million dollars worth of cocaine would be around 30 kilos

          But is it cheaper than printer ink?

          • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

            by guruevi ( 827432 )

            Not quite. According to Wikipedia 1 liter of ink is about $3000, 30 kg is 30 L of water so 30 L would be about $60000 if ink has the same density than water. Of course quoted cocaine prices are for the US. 1M of coke in other parts of the world gives you much more substance. 1 kilo of coke can cost $1800 in Colombia (wholesale) but cost over $30000 in NYC. So by those standards coke CAN be cheaper than ink (don't sniff the paper)

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:22AM (#27111037)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by b4upoo ( 166390 )

        I wonder how many minutes it took for another server to put the same material back on line. Heck, it could be a challenge. We could get it down to a how many seconds type of contest.
                          This simply emphasises the need to have servers in different nations so that law enforcement remains ineffective in regard to copying software, movies and music.

    • by troll8901 ( 1397145 ) * <troll8901@gmail.com> on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:45AM (#27111151) Journal

      The same spin doctors that run the drug war are now being employed in the Imaginary Property war.

      "Mister Threepwood, it is MY experience that there are only two kinds of pirates: Those who are committing acts of wanton savagery, and those PLANNING to commit acts of wanton savagery!"

      - Admiral Ricardo Luigi Pierre M'Benga Chang Nehru O'Hara Casaba the Third, Monkey Island 4.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08, 2009 @05:56AM (#27110937)

    The filesharing server is giving out the content. The Pirate Bay does not.

  • by Kokuyo ( 549451 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @05:56AM (#27110939) Journal

    ...and just assuming the summary isn't stupid, I'd say this was a good thing. 65 TB of files is... fucking huge.

    THIS is what I understand when someone talks about piracy; a few individuals who move about large quantities of media content.

    Now the big question would be whether they made money that way, which I assume they did. After all, how do you pay for a 65TB server with corresponding bandwidth?

    • by Plunky ( 929104 )
      and presumably they should also be prosecuting the people who told them about the servers, since pointing to a server that you can infringe copyright at is also prosecutable.. or is it?
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by 91degrees ( 207121 )
        No.

        There's a concept of intent. If you do something to assist a crime, you're potentially an accessory. If you do something to prevent a crime you're helping the police.

        I really don't see any inconsistency here.
      • by dissy ( 172727 )

        and presumably they should also be prosecuting the people who told them about the servers, since pointing to a server that you can infringe copyright at is also prosecutable.. or is it?

        It is if you start to refer to doing so as 'verbal hyperlinking', then it becomes accessory to copyright infringement! yaay

    • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:03AM (#27110959)

      After all, how do you pay for a 65TB server with corresponding bandwidth?

      How much is the "corresponding" bandwidth? Not sure what you mean by that phrase. I could afford a 65TB server without any difficulty. I don't need one, but we're not talking about something astonishing here. Less than I'm about to spend on roof repairs *grumble*

    • corresponding

      Could you please take a moment to estimate how much bandwidth "corresponds" to 65TB of disk space?

      Or is that the same "corresponding" as the one that resulted in "16,000 movies"? :P

    • by Splab ( 574204 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:25AM (#27111051)

      Why do you assume that just because you pay extortion like prices for internet where ever you are in the world that everyone else does the same? This is in Sweden, so he most likely has access to 100mbit connection for around $50 a month (if that pricey) with a truly unlimited plan.

      Also 65TB while expensive, isn't that hard to build these days, usually you would do so by picking up server hardware from business going under and just fill them with cheap(er) hardware.

      • by Mirar ( 264502 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @07:35AM (#27111351) Homepage

        My 100Mbps (in reality 60Mbps down/20Mbps up) is baked into the rent whether I'd use it or not, so it's "free".

        A quick google reveals that several housings in Brandbergen (Haninge, Stockholm) - where the hit was made - have a similar deal. It's fairly common here. So it might not even cost anything to have bandwidth enough to fileshare on a large scale.

        Not that I know if "Scene" people actually fileshare on a large scale.

    • ...and just assuming the summary isn't stupid

      That's crazy talk!

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Idiomatick ( 976696 )
      Yeah, that's like the price of a used car... 10k US for the drives. Probably another few hundred for the computers. The rest is internet fees. $500/mnth in donations is pretty normal for these things. So it is doable.

      My suspicion comes here. What could the server have? 65TB isn't just a lot, it is a suspicious amount. Lets break it down.

      Say he has 800,000songs he serves (around 7years solid of music) that is 4TB of space. And lets say the rest is videos. That is about 88,000 DVDs. That since movies began
    • by jedrek ( 79264 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @07:46AM (#27111401) Homepage

      65TB isn't 'fucking huge' in the world of the 'scene'. Take any movie that comes out, it goes through a couple release cycles. First you get the CAM, which is some dude in a theater with a video camera in his lap. So that's 700mb for the divx and 4gb for the DVD-R of that. Then the TC, another 4.7gb, R5 or DVDSCR: 4.7gb, retail rip: 4.7gb + 4gb for the PAL DVD-R. Then somebody releases a divx internal: 1.4gb and a dvd9: 9gb. Then it comes out on blu-ray and there's a 720p rip at 4gb and a 1080p rip at 9gb. That's almost 50gb for the full lifespan of a single movie release, not counting kids movies that often come out in language-specific versions.

      TV shows are huge too. Approx 10gb of new TV shows were released yesterday in xvid and x264. That's the major shows - you could easily double it counting Discovery Channel shows, British TV, etc. It's like that, day in, day out.

      Games and applications come in at 1-14gb/pop, including almost-monthly releases of windows xp, windows xp64, vista x86 and 64bit.

      And remember, this is all spread out over multiple servers, multiple copies, etc.

      The fact is that there is just an incredible amount of data out there being produced every single day.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Zironic ( 1112127 )

      Since noone else seems to have explained this simple concept that's rather common in sweden it seems I'll have to do it.

      In Sweden access to 100mb unlimited bandwith(or well technically it's usually 60 down 20 up but it's still unlimited) is rather common. So what people do is that they go together 5-20 people and chip in for an FTP server and put it in one of the persons with a good connection's house.

      That way it's not horribly expensive for any of them but they all now got access to more file space then th

  • "Corresponding"? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Reality Master 301 ( 1462839 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @05:57AM (#27110943)
    There wasn't 16k movies, nor 65tb of files. The media exaggerates everything, the only thing they know is that the serverS (note the s) had a combined storage space of 65tb.
  • by alienunknown ( 1279178 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @05:59AM (#27110947)
    Some members of this site may be concerned with how many libraries of congress this 65 terabytes can hold. I'm more concerned with how much of the 65 terabytes is porn.

    If 65 terabytes of porn has just been removed from the net it could very well be the largest tragedy that the internets have ever encountered. Just thinking of such a tragedy brings a tear to my eye.

    Backup server, anyone?

  • by pallmall1 ( 882819 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:01AM (#27110951)

    Today they seized a fileserver containing about 65 terabytes of files...

    Gee, I guess that's why the one seeder of the torrent file I was downloading went offline. Strange, I shuddered with pain [startrek.com] when it happened, like 65 terabytes crying out in astonishement as the server died.

  • Torrent Freak (Score:4, Informative)

    by Norsefire ( 1494323 ) * on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:04AM (#27110969) Journal
    According to the related article on TorrentFreak [torrentfreak.com] the server was a topsite used by numerous scene groups and Peter Sunde (aka Brokep of the The Pirate Bay) has said that "it is possible that it's a major source" for The Pirate Bay.
  • 65 TB?!?! *gasp* (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vigmeister ( 1112659 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:14AM (#27110995)

    Today they seized a fileserver containing about 65 terabytes of files, corresponding to around 16,000 full-length movies

    65 terabytes of files? Storage space of that magnitude is unfathomable! How many full length movies would that be? 16000 you say? That is still too large for me to process. If I wrote down all the files in 1s and 0s, how many football fields would that occupy?

    Every slashdot user can divide 65 TB by the size of a DVD. Unfortunately, full-length movies are NOT a standard measure of storage space. Least of all on slashdot in the context of file-sharing.

    Cheers!

    • by Skapare ( 16644 )

      65 terabytes of files? Storage space of that magnitude is unfathomable! How many full length movies would that be? 16000 you say? That is still too large for me to process. If I wrote down all the files in 1s and 0s, how many football fields would that occupy?

      At the standard Moore's Law rate, if applied to storage, you'll be able to carry all that around in your pocket in 15 years.

      • At the standard Moore's Law rate, if applied to storage, you'll be able to carry all that around in your pocket in 15 years.

        And I thought my joke alluding to goatse was gross. This is just sick.

    • by tpgp ( 48001 ) * on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:35AM (#27111095) Homepage

      If I wrote down all the files in 1s and 0s, how many football fields would that occupy?

      Depends on the font size.

    • by julian67 ( 1022593 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:44AM (#27111147)
      For UK readers 65TB of files is the equivalent to an area half the size of Wales, 10 Wembleys, 3 Home Office Detention Centres or 12 double decker buses!!!
  • by Arancaytar ( 966377 ) <arancaytar.ilyaran@gmail.com> on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:15AM (#27111001) Homepage

    That's very amazing. Movie technology has existed how long now? If we're very generous and round it up to 100 years, then the world must have produced 160 movies per year, or nearly one every two days, for there to be that many.

    Gosh, the box office has been busy, hasn't it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Note that movies are being used here as unit of measurement. The article doesn't mention what portion of that data are movies or whether or not it contains any movies at all.
      • movies are being used here as unit of measurement

        Actually they are being used as a unit of scaremongering [wikipedia.org], and a strange kind of filesharing that would be where one server holds every file in full, amounting to a total of 65 TB.

        If they are talking about some FTPWelt.com [cebit.de] kind of pay-for-download archive, there seems to be something fishy (in particular at this point in time) about the purported link between TPB and an alleged über-Camorra known as -OMG, shiver me timbers- "The Scene".

    • Re:16,000 movies? (Score:5, Informative)

      by odie_q ( 130040 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @07:37AM (#27111367)

      IMDb lists 438,664 theatrically released movies.
      Source: IMDb statistics page [imdb.com]

  • by D4C5CE ( 578304 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:18AM (#27111011)

    the server is part of an international pirate network called "The Scene,"

    What a well-organized network that must be to have such unmistakably identifiable persons (some even being computers!) among its membership under this absolutely new and unique trademark name. ;-)
    Now where are the ships and home port of their evil "pirate" fleet?

    • The pirates' naming convention was itself, pirated, from Monty Python's "The Piranha Brothers" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirahna_Brothers):

      The server was associated with a pirate scene, which they called, "The Scene." They formed a gang, which they called "The Gang." They ran operations, known as "The Operation, The Other Operation, and The Other Other Operation."

      After becoming bored with Monty Python, they pirated the name of their network ring from "Buffy", calling it "Sunnydale."

      Definitely a pattern of pirate behaviour.

  • Whoopy do. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jack2000 ( 1178961 )
    How do I mod the entire article -1: Stupid?
  • "SmugJerk writes "Authorities are continuing to apply pressure on Sweden's filesharing community amid the trial of several principals of The Pirate Bay filesharing site. Today they seized a fileserver containing about 65 terabytes of files, corresponding to around 16,000 full-length movies."

    OK so let me know when we get to the particular right that's being violated and I'll get excited. Otherwise it's business as usual around here.

  • by philipmather ( 864521 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:50AM (#27111171) Homepage Journal

    65 terabytes? Shirley you don't need a full install of Vista just for a file server?

    Come on... the "Libraries of Congress" gag has been done so it only left me with the "in Soviet Russia" line, "...profit" or generic Microsoft bashing. ;^P

  • Must have been (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rrohbeck ( 944847 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:52AM (#27111185)
  • by meist3r ( 1061628 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:56AM (#27111213)
    Jeez, does anyone ever check their sources? MSNBC of all things? You know what the MS stands for do you?

    Other than that:

    There was not ONE server with 65TB but a "ring" of servers with "suspected" 65TB overall data. Police took down exactly one single server. All the other servers were shut down by the people running them so they could not be traced further.

    [ENG] http://torrentfreak.com/large-pirate-topsite-raided-in-sweden-090306/ [torrentfreak.com]
    [SWE] http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article4582094.ab [aftonbladet.se]
    [ENG] http://www.thelocal.se/18050/20090306/ [thelocal.se]
    Just the fact that they dub that "the biggest raid ever" is such a hilarious demonstration of how much they don't know.

    "Ponten said the server ring had collapsed as a direct result of the raid." hahahaha
    Did you mean, was redirected and pulled out of your sight? And even if it "collapsed" these are Gigabit sites, backup is easy and there is, well let me understate, definitely more than one of these.
  • by heretoo ( 1230368 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @07:37AM (#27111365)
    Mmm hmm... and they all belonged to a network called "The Scene".. probably made with a "series of tubes"..
  • Thank God! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) * on Sunday March 08, 2009 @08:52AM (#27111675) Journal

    The streets of Sweden are now again safe for copyright lawyers and trolls, movie studio heads and...um, well that's a start.

    I hate the way this summary seems to conflate somebody with a big server who may or may not have movies on it with The Pirate Bay, who you may know, does not share movies from their computers.

    If you are someone who believes that this crackdown on filesharing is a good thing, please put together your best argument, write it on a piece of A4 stationary, fold it in quarters and stick it as far up your ass as you can.

    That made me feel better.

  • by zmollusc ( 763634 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @02:56PM (#27113755)

    I wondered what the hell was causing today's havoc. I work at the local multiplex and it was just crazy all shift, queues right round the block. People were coming in saying "Tickets for _anything_, hurry,hurry! Keep the change!" and throwing handfuls of money at the till. We had to call for a security van to take the sacks of money away before they filled the whole office.

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