14 DAY TRIAL // The Indian BitTorrent community is on edge after police arrested four individuals for piracy related offences, two of which were high ranking members of a local torrent tracker.
The accused are Mohammed Imran @ Hameed, 20, G. Gopal Reddy, 24, B. Yeshwanth @ Yogi, 19, all of Hyderabad, and D. Vijay Prabhanj Reddy, of Pulivendula.
Police claims that Mohammed Imran and Gopal Reddy were engaged in producing, selling and distributing counterfeit CDs, activities for which they've also been arrested in the past.
Gopal Reddy was obtaining CDs with the latest Bollywood and foreign movies from an individual in Dhoolpet named Manish @ Giri @ Gabbar and was using a CD writer to make copies.
Mohammed Imran was handling the selling and distributions part of the network and his usual customers were shops around the city.
He also supplied CDs to Yashwanth, who was an uploader on one of the most popular torrent sites in India called TorrentRockerz.com.
Vijay Prabhanj Reddy acted as a TorrentRockerz administrator and, in addition to performing website maintenance, he was in charge of checking the quality of the uploaded torrents and approving them.
Through this four-man piracy network movies were being posted online as soon as one or two days after their release in cinemas and weeks in advance of the official CDs/DVDs becoming available.
Authorities claim that TorrentRockerz admins earned money through advertisements displayed on the website and from the Anti Piracy Cell, which paid them to delete movies.
The Anti Piracy Cell is an organization funded by Bollywood film studios to remove their copyrighted content from websites.
It seems that such organizations are willing to share the earnings with torrent trackers in order to achieve their goal and maintain a high success rate.
Aiplex Software, another Indian company contracted by Bollywood for similar purposes, reportedly made a profit sharing proposal to ICTorrent in the past.
TorrentFreak reports that some local tracker admins have already closed down their websites, fearing that these arrests are part of an upcoming larger police operation.