The 285,000 member Greek-Fun.com carried around 14,000 links to music, domestic and international movies, software and computers games. Around 5,500 of these are believed to have linked to material in the EPOE repertoire. As is usual with these cases, EPOE were quick to point to the financing of the site as an indication of criminal behavior. Like many sites, Greek-Fun offered benefits to users who donated to keep the site running although the admins denied profiteering.

In the end at least one administrator of the site, believed to be in his early 30’s, was arrested and several people were questioned with investigators linking site email addresses to Facebook accounts for evidence. EPOE said the site caused it 1.8m euros in damages.

As the bad news about Greek-Fun spread, Greece’s largest private tracker – the huge 898,000 member Gamato.info – also unexpectedly went down, officially due to “technical problems”. Whatever the reason, as can be seen by the graph below, the result was a massive drop in Greek Internet traffic. Gamato remained down for several weeks, only opening again during the first few days of February 2010.

Today, however, the site is down again, and the news is not good.

ELAS (Greek police) are engaged in an on-going operation to round up the administrators of the site. Already there are reports of 3 arrests in Athens (the capital and one of the world’s oldest cities) and 3 in Thessaloniki (Greece’s 2nd largest city). A soldier, a musician and a confectioner are among those arrested.

New information suggests that ELAS have alerted Interpol to arrest two further admins who are apparently reside outside the country. TorrentFreak has learned that they are located in The Netherlands and are being called “the brains” behind the site. The Gamato servers are also located there although it’s unclear at this stage if there is a connection.

“We host a lot of different sites and do not keep tabs on our clients as long as they comply with our Terms of Service, which includes confirming to the Dutch law,” Gamato’s host told TorrentFreak, adding: “As far as we and our legal counsel can see, this is the case with the site mentioned by you.”

It’s believed that police are looking for 11 individuals in total. Thus far, 27 hard drives, five laptops and more than 600 DVDs have been seized.

According to the police, file-sharing on Gamato was responsible for 80% of online piracy in Greece, with EPOE calculating its losses at the hands of the tracker at a staggering 1 billion euros.

Although Gamato was a private torrent site, it didn’t follow the usual format. It wasn’t “invite-only” – anyone could signup – and although sharing ratios were counted there were no punishments or rewards for the amounts shared. Furthermore, unlike Greek-Fun, Gamato did not accept donations from users.

The Society for the Protection of Audiovisual Works (EPOE) shot to fame in 2008 when virtually every site offering user-generated Greek subtitles (fansubs) for English language movies and TV shows became recipients of its legal threats. Within a very short time sites including greektvsubs.gr, subtitles.gr, greeksubs, subs4u.gr and apsubs.com had either closed down or removed all subtitles.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

It therefore came as a surprise when we found out that three major US ISPs – Comcast, Cox and Warner Cable – have been funding research which aims to help copyright holders track down and gather evidence against BitTorrent pirates more efficiently.

Unlike most of the ‘passive’ BitTorrent tracking tools that are in fashion today, BitStalker uses an ‘active’ method through which they can actually prove that the BitTorrent client associated with an IP-address is sharing files. Where the passive methods wrongfully accuse 1 in 10 downloaders, BitStalker promises to avoid such false positives.

The researchers who developed BitStalker further claim (pdf) that their tool is much more effective than the current competition, as it would allow copyright holders to get information on 20 million BitTorrent users for a bargain price of $12.40. What remains unclear, however, is why three large ISPs are interested in funding this project.

It is no secret that the RIAA has been pushing Comcast, Cox and other ISPs to take stricter measures against copyright infringers, including the ultimate sanction of terminating customers’ Internet access. However, thus far the ISPs have largely maintained their neutral position as information carriers.

Whether the funding of BitStalker’s research is a signal that this may change is open for speculation. Another argument for ISPs to join could be that they want to protect their customers from receiving copyright infringement notices in error.

Regarding the BitStalker method of tracking BitTorrent users, we can say that it is not as revolutionary as the researchers portray it. TorrentFreak spoke to several people who are currently operating the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet and none of them was impressed by BitStalker’s technology.

If BitStalker is indeed implemented the large scale monitoring will have to be executed from thousands of IP-addresses. Most trackers have rules in place so that one single IP-address will be banned from the tracker if it connects to too many torrents.

Similarly, if BitStalker was put on a cloud service like the research suggests, it wouldn’t take long before these IP-ranges would appear in block-lists, rendering BitStalker useless.

If we add to this that BitStalker’s active BitTorrent tracking method will require users to be ‘connectible’, which a large percentage of users aren’t, this means that it will result in many false negatives. The researchers report that they could only connect to less than half of all available peers, which might be caused in the main by the connectability issue.

Whatever the motivations are for Comcast and the other ISPs to fund this project, the good news is that less people will be accused of uploading something they haven’t. Whether BitStalker will really be that more efficient depends on one’s definition of efficiency. For now, we doubt that it will result in a global BitTorrent crackdown.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.