Law-enforcement authorities in the U.S. launched a series of raids Tuesday, targeted at piracy of software, computer games and movies. In a coordinated action, authorities in the U.K., Australia, Finland, and Norway also executed search warrants for leading members of the so-called warez scene, acting on information supplied by the U.S.

There have been no arrests yet in the U.S., though nine people have been taken into custody in the other countries involved, said Kevin Bell, a spokesman for the U.S. Customs Service, which carried out the U.S. raids. Another 20 countries are expected to take similar enforcement actions, he added.

The major target of the offensive, known as Operation Buccaneer, was a warez group called DrinkOrDie that has some 40 members worldwide and was founded in the early 1990s in Russia, Bell said.

"They're considered the most sophisticated and well known warez group," he said, "That's the reason we decided to target Drinkordie."

Drinkordie's Web site, http://www.drinkordie.com/, was offline Wednesday.

Information gained through the investigation of DrinkOrDie has led to the infiltration of other groups and individuals. The top eight to 10 major warez groups, which together account for an estimated 95 percent of all pirated software offered on the Web, are all targeted, Bell said. The software industry says it loses some US$12 billion worldwide a year to piracy.

Operation Buccaneer, which was over a year in preparation, is the most extensive undercover investigation of software piracy the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has ever taken part in. It is the first to reach across international borders to target "the most highly placed and skilled members of these international criminal enterprises," DOJ said.

Warez groups, often working in syndicate with company insiders, can bring pirated software, games, and movies onto the black market shortly after, or even before, legitimate versions are released. The U.S. officials said they expect to seize pirated copies worth millions of dollars, as well as computer equipment used in the piracy rings.

Agents raided a number of U.S. university campuses and company headquarters, targeting students, LAN administrators, and software company employees who were implicated in helping traffic in pirated goods, Bell said.

"The companies and the universities that were involved are cooperating. They were victims of this," he added. He declined to name any of the locations where raids took place, commenting, "The warrants are still sealed, so I can't tell you where or who exactly."

The New York Times reported Wednesday that authorities raided dormitory rooms at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and Purdue University in West Layfayette, Indiana, and that one undergraduate student at each had been questioned. Raids also took place at the economics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, at the University of California at Los Angeles and at an off-campus location at the University of Oregon in Eugene, the newspaper reported.

As part of Tuesday's sting operation, a two-year undercover investigation known as Operation Bandwidth was brought to its conclusion, with more than 30 search warrants executed across the U.S. and Canada. Agents had created a warez Web site, attracting more than 200 people who used the site to illegally transfer over 100,000 files, including 12,000 separate software programs, movies, and games.

» posted by abennett

IDG News Service

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