Online Piracy: The Finance Guard obscures 20 file sharing sites

[Len]

The Guardia di Finanza has completed an important online piracy operation involving six Italian regions and has allowed the Yellow Flames to close 20 pirated sites for the illegal distribution of copyrighted digital material.

The cyberlocked operation has identified a number of websites where software - but also e-books and multimedia files - were traded and sold without the appropriate concessions. Computer criminals have managed over time to create a dense structured network, able to " monopolize the black market of digital piracy on a national scale ". To give an idea of the size of the illegal file sharing market, it is thought that this is capable of generating 1.2 billion euro damage each year and is the cause of the loss of 6,000 jobs.

Investigators (8 in total) have been "professionals" in the industry, having encoding and e-book DRM removal software and audio and video decoding tools. So the Guardia di Finanza comments on the operation:

Summoning sites have been aggregated and offered a wide variety of content. The mechanism of sharing them by uploading on so-called cyberlockers that provide an Internet storage service and daily millions of downloads.