China syndromeChina offers Internet pirates bulletproof havens for illegal file sharing
Most bulletproof hosts which allow music, video, and software to be illegally shared online are located in China, where criminals are able to take advantage of low costs and legal loopholes to avoid prosecution; despite officials in Beijing talking in tough terms about computer crime — hacking potentially carries a death sentence in China — the authorities rarely cooperate with other countries to take action against hi-tech criminals; as a result, just a handful of firms in China are responsible for hosting thousands of criminal enterprises online; one example: more than 22,000 Web sites which sent pharmaceutical spam were hosted by six bulletproof servers in China
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 Guardian’s Bobbie Johnson writes that the change is rooted in the evolution of “bulletproof hosting,” or Web site 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.”
Late last year a Swedish court found four men guilty of breaking copyright law through their links to the Pirate Bay Web site, one of the Internet’s most notorious gateways for pirated films and television shows. That decision prompted many piracy services to seek jurisdictions beyond the reach of Western law. Pirate Bay moved its web servers to Ukraine, while another popular file-sharing service, Demonoid, which started in Serbia, also relocated.
“Before going completely dark in October [2009], Demonoid physically moved their servers to Ukraine, and remotely controlled them,” said John Robinson, of BigChampagne, a media tracking service based in Los Angeles. “Ukrainian communications law, as they paraphrase it, says that providers are not responsible for what their customers do. Therefore, they feel no need to speak about or defend what they do.”
Johnson writes that not every controversial service has fled beyond traditional jurisdictions, however. Some problematic hosts still exist in the United States, such as the infamous host McColo, which was based in San Jose, California, and remained in operation until last year.
Pirate Bay, after its brief excursion to Ukraine, is now run out of a Dutch
