Bulgarian police shut down websites

The entertainment industry is continuing its mission to clamp down on suspected illegal filesharing websites around the world.

Four sites have been closed in Bulgaria after months of investigating by the country’s Cyber Crime unit following a complaint by the Bulgarian Association of the Music Producers (BAMP), representing the music industry.

It was alleged that nanoset.net, rapidadd.com, 4storing.com and afasta.com were run by an organised criminal network and were illegally distributing books, films, games, music and software on a large scale.

Bulgarian police believe users paid around €2.5 million to access the site's services, and revenue was also raised through advertising sales.

Ina Kilеva, executive director of BAMP, says: “The sheer scale of this operation, the quantity of seized pirate content and the vast financial profit of the criminals involved shows clearly what an enormous problem piracy is in Bulgaria.

“It is depriving creators and artists of their livelihoods, feeding organised crime and frustrating all efforts to build a successful legal digital music market.

“Officers from the Cyber Crime Unit are to be congratulated for their professional work in defence of intellectual property rights online. It is only by such actions that Bulgaria can hope to develop a legitimate digital economy in the future.”

Internet piracy is a huge problem in Bulgaria, which is said to have the lowest revenues from physical format sales in Europe. There is also negligible income from digital sales and a piracy rate estimated at almost 100 per cent.

Three of the top five most-visited Bulgarian websites, excluding international sites such as Google or Facebook, are infringing services, according to Alexa, a company analyzing web traffic.

On 29 July investigators searched the premises of several internet service providers where the website operators had concealed servers containing more than 120 terabytes of unlicensed content, the equivalent of more than 200,000 CDs.

Officers also seized two computers and documents from one of the people they arrested who is suspected of orchestrating the illegal operation.