The U.S. Department of Justice has confiscated throughout the weekend several hundred computers, and has arrested four persons, within a large scale operation to stop online piracy and the illegal distribution of copyrighted material as movies, software and games, out of which by far the most requested was Star Wars - Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith.
Operation Site Down, as this action was dubbed, involved the issuing of over 90 search warrants within the United
States and ten other countries as well. The searches have begun last Wednesday, and lead to the shut down of at least eight major pirated content distributors.
Naturally, the operation has been praised by the entertainment and software industries, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said about the operation that "By dismantling these networks, the Department is striking at the top of the copyright piracy supply chain".
Usually, the warez groups are hard to penetrate, because their members are computer experts, are located far from each other and communicate through encrypted messages.
The FBI has staged somewhat of a Trojan Horse act, managing fool its victims by installing a large number of servers which would have supposedly been used for storing the illegal materials.
The persons arrested during this campaign are William Venya, aged 34, from Chatsworth; Chirayu Patel, aged 23, from Fremont; Nate Lovell, 22-years old, from Boulder, Colorado; and David Fish, aged 24, from Watertown, Conneticut. Each of them has been charged with copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit such acts. The four will be brought before a court of law in San Jose by July 14, 2005.
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