The Polish police has shut down a Polish top site, called HPN. The site was a scene mp3-only site. The site had rather good pre-retail mp3 affils. The server was located in Wroclaw. It hosted more than 11,000 complete MP3 albums and promotional CDs on its server for users to download.
The HPN server was shut down during a raid at Wroclaw Technical University. The police also visited the HPN administrator’s home and have, in total, confiscated six servers with 37 hard drives containing 12 terabytes of disk space. Two people have been arrested and they are helping the police with their enquiries.
Investigators at IFPI, the body that represents the recording industry worldwide, ZPAV, which represents the recording industry in Poland, and anti-piracy group FOTA gathered evidence and drew the secretive HPN server to the attention of the Economic Crime Division of the Wroclaw Police who have subsequently conducted the raids and begun to question suspects.
Jeremy Banks, Head of the Internet Anti-Piracy Unit at IFPI, says: “People that post pre-release material onto the internet are without doubt harming the music industry; one posting on a topsite can see an album appear in thousands of different locations across the internet in a matter of hours. The industry is highly focused on the problem of pre-release piracy and these actions in Poland will not be the last of their kind.”
