E Mule/Donkey Server Seized

[GhostShip]

Earlier on taday the biggest e-mule/donkey server in the world was hit by Belgian authorities and closed down for an unknown reason.

http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19470

With more than one million users, the largest server eDonkey/eMule in the world, Razorback, east was gone this morning in the hands of the Belgian federal police force. Two of its administrators remain uncontactable as we write these lines.

We have only very small information. The whole of the servers of Razorback were seized this morning towards 10H by the Belgian federal police force. Although Razorback association domiciled in Switzerland, it is in Belgium that the system main part was installed.
Razorback did not lodge any illegal contents and even took part very actively in the diffusion of legal contents such as those of our chain of remote loading of software or the free musics of Jamendo.

The server used for eMule and eDonkey was nevertheless an index of the millions of  files exchanged on the networks peer-to-peer, including one great part were illicit.
The principal administrator of Razorback had indicated in the past that it was ready to blacklist the files indicated to him by the holders of copyright, but  never had any answer.
Finally the whole of the material was seized this morning, indicates a source close to Razorback to us.

I hope you all dont mind my editing of this notice to make it semi legible to us, it being based on a roughly translated french original.

Its bad news whatever the story but time will tell if its going to cause a major backlash from the users of the emule/donkey systems.  

[GhostShip]

This is a real article as opposed to the forum translation we saw yesterday and contains this MPAA announcement.

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1102

In a joint operation today police and prosecuting authorities in Belgium and Switzerland shut down the infamous file-swapping network Razorback2. Razorback2 was the number one eDonkey peer-to-peer server facilitating the illegal file swapping of approximately 1.3 million users simultaneously. Razorback2 was operated as a commercial enterprise indexing over 170 million files including millions of copyrighted movies, software, games, TV programming and music with international and U.S. titles. The site was regularly used by people located all over the world, with the vast majority of users based in Europe.

"This is a major victory in our fight to cut off the supply of illegal materials being circulated on the Internet via peer-to-peer networks," said Motion Picture Association (MPA) Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman. "By shaving the illegal traffic of copyrighted works facilitated by Razorback2, we are depleting other illegal networks of their ability to supply Internet pirates with copyrighted works which is a positive step in our international effort to fight piracy."

Swiss authorities arrested the site's operator at his residence in Switzerland this morning and searched his home. At the same time, on the authority of a local magistrate, Belgian police seized the site's servers located at an Internet hosting center in Zaventem near Brussels. The operation conducted by Swiss and Belgian authorities aimed at cutting off a major supply and facilitator of illegal files to several popular illegal file swapping networks. By shutting down Razorback2, the ease with which pirates can obtain illegal content online will slow dramatically. Since November of 2004, authorities have closed down all of the major eDonkey servers in the United States, and now, Europe.

Hmm fighting talk, but was it legal to seize these servers ?

Doubtles this story will run on for a while but I think this demonstrates once again the superior attributes of a decentralisd network.

[Lysander]

This is what you get for trying to hide from US authority in a country who's laws are even more draconian than the US is becoming.