Police in more than a dozen countries have seized computers and made arrests in a crackdown on illegal file-swapping instigated by US investigators, the Dutch government said on Thursday. Authorities raided several locations in The Netherlands on Wednesday as part of an operation initiated by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and arrested three people on suspicion of computer file-sharing, the Finance Ministry said.
More computers were seized on Wednesday in Australia, Israel, Germany, South-Korea, Norway, France, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Poland, Canada and Hungary, said a spokeswoman for the ministry, which is responsible for preventing economic crime.
The people arrested in The Netherlands are suspected of infringing the copyright of films, software and video games. Some of the titles had yet to be published, she said. It is the second internationally orchestrated raid on computer file swappers, after the April 2004 arrest of members of the "Fairlight" group in another FBI investigation.
US ARRESTS
Authorities in the United States made arrests as well, and were expected to announce the results of their raid at 2 pm Eastern time (1800 GMT). An FBI official declined to comment.
Illegal swapping of copyright-protected music, films, games and software over the Internet, using programmes such as BitTorrent and KaZaA, is responsible for about half of all Internet traffic in many developed nations, according to market research groups. In many countries it is not illegal to download certain digital files such as music, but it is illegal to upload them and make them available to other computer users on the Internet.
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