Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Hollywood Shuts Down Major File Swapping Hub

The Motion Picture Association (MPAA) is cheering the shutdown of a major file swapping hub, Razorback2, by authorities in Belgium and Switzerland yesterday. The group said yesterday that police and prosecuters had shut down the major eDonkey peer to peer server, which the group claims had an index of over 170 million files, including copyrighted movies, software, games, TV programming, and music. The server had the capability to serve up to 1.3 million users simultaneously, and mostly served Europe. Authorities in Switzerland arrested the operator of the site, and Belgian police seized the site's servers at an Internet hosting center. Peer-to-peer file sharing has been a major focus of the MPAA, which has also successfully shut down eDonkey and other file swapping hubs here in the United States.

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