As German media company Heise.de reports, the "Gesellschaft zur Verfolgung von Urheberrechtsverletzungen" ("Association for the Prosecution of Copyright violations") (GVU) was paid a visit by the German police.
This tuesday morning around 10:00, police searched more than 200 locations in Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, Poland and Czechia. Overall 20 servers were confiscated, apparently they were used to distribute illegal copies of movies via FTP/FXP. No comments from the GVU so far, but you can see their stash on the picture.
This in many ways seems like poetic justice — an association that is pushing for the criminalisation of copyright violations hoping to strip- and cavity-search every man, woman, child and toddler for potentially hidden unauthorised copies, has apparently hoped to lure potential victims into their fangs by offering downloads and are now caught in their own web.
I certainly hope they themselves appreciate the experience that they seek to bring upon the rest of society.
[update]
According to a followup article on Heise.de it seems that the GVU indeed did pay the admin of a "warez" site to get IP addresses and other logged information, they also appear to have donated hardware and illegal copies themselves.
The website of the GVU is now offline, and the GVU appears to be under investigation for abetment.
Don’t ask me why, but it does remind me of the campaign in which they tried to deter kids from illegal copying by threatening them with rape in jail. Hm.
