Internet pirates find ‘bulletproof’ havens for illegal file sharing (Rob Holmes featured)

The Guardian, Tuesday 5 January 2010 (Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent)

Internet pirates are moving away from safe havens such as Sweden to new territories that include China and Ukraine, as they try to avoid prosecution for illegal file sharing, according to experts.

For several years, piracy groups that run services allowing music, video and software to be illegally shared online have been using legal loopholes across a wide range of countries as a way of escaping prosecution for copyright infringement.

In the last year there has been a significant shift, say piracy experts, as the groups have worked to stay beyond the reach of western law enforcement.

The change is rooted in the evolution of “bulletproof hosting”, or website provision by companies that make a virtue of being impervious to legal threats and blocks. Not all bulletproof services are linked to illegal activities, but they are popular among criminal groups, spammers and file-sharing services.

Rob Holmes, of the Texas law firm IP Cybercrime, which has worked to close down several bulletproof operations, said successful hosts were now starting to get stronger. “Some of the more popular ones have become more strongholds than they were previously,” he said. “It’s an industry and it always will be. When you think about it, bulletproof hosting is just a data version of money laundering.”

Read the full story here.

“There will always be a place to run to,” said Rob Holmes, of IP Cybercrime. “Each time a law passes, or a new country creates some kind of stumbling block for them, they’ll always find another place to do this. It goes back to the speakeasies in the 1920s – when one place got busted, they would just congregate in another place.”