Police in 11 countries performed 120 searches and made several arrests in connection to the international piracy group Fairlight. Among the computers that were seized was one system that housed 65,000 pirated titles.
In Singapore, police made three arrests. One was said to have been purchasing pirated software from Fairlight since 2001. Fairlight was said to be highly organized.
Two of the men from Singapore were said to have been downloading pirated software and sending it to neighbouring countries for replication in factories.
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The US DOJ goes after pirates
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Attorney General John Ashcroft announced today the most far-reaching and aggressive enforcement action ever undertaken against organizations involved in illegal intellectual property piracy over the Internet. Beginning yesterday morning, law enforcement from 10 countries and the United States conducted over 120 searches worldwide to dismantle some of the most well-known and prolific online piracy organizations.
�Intellectual property theft is a global problem that hurts economies around the world. To be effective, we must respond globally,� Attorney General Ashcroft said. �In the past 24 hours, working closely with our foreign law enforcement counterparts, we have moved aggressively to strike at the very core of the international online piracy world.�
Operation Fastlink is the culmination of four separate undercover investigations simultaneously being conducted by the FBI, coordinated by the FBI Cyber Division, and the U.S. Department of Justice, coordinated by the Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) of the Criminal Division. As a result of Fastlink, over 120 total searches have been executed in the past 24 hours in 27 states and in 10 foreign countries. Foreign searches were conducted in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden as well as Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Operation Fastlink is the largest multi-national law enforcement effort ever directed at online piracy. Nearly 100 individuals worldwide have been identified by the investigation to date, many of whom are the leaders or high-level members of various international piracy organizations. As the investigations continue, additional targets will be identified and pursued.
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Operation Fastlink went after the top end warez distributors. They seized 200 computers and 30 servers during the operation. I don't know how many warez sites there are out there. But this seems like a very small number compared to what you can find on the internet by just typing warez in google.
The Department of Justice's investigation was conducted under the direction of the FBI and with the assistance of numerous intellectual property trade associations, including the Business Software Alliance, the Entertainment Software Association, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America.
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