Spain’s La Guardia Civil has blocked 23 pirate websites that provided copyrighted content over P2P networks.
These pages, which were hosted and operated from abroad, offered download links to pirated movies, series and video games, with 80% of their traffic originating in Spain.
The Guardia Civil, within the framework of operation CASCADA, has initiated a campaign to block web pages from downloading and distributing copyrighted content via links in P2P networks.
In this first phase, a total of 23 web domains have been blocked from accessing direct download links to all types of protected audiovisualmmaterial such as movies, series, music and videogames, many of them recently created, finding several works available without having yet been released in Spain.
Most of the websites investigated had very high daily visits rates, some of them being among the best known and used in Spain, including www.divxtotal.com, www.estrenosdtl.com or www.gamestorrents.com, amongmany others.
According to the Spanish police, these domains were originally created by a person of Spanish origin, who sold them to a company based in Argentina which is their current owner and administrator.
Those responsible for the pages used various methods to avoid closing or blocking them, such as hiding the actual location of their servers and the registration data of the contracted domains, even to the constant change of the location of their servers in several countries.
Cases have been detected in which previously judicially blocked domains were reactivated in a matter of hours, with practically identical domain names or even changing only the extent of them. In this way, and even if several successive blockades were carried out, they were able to revive the web pages again in a very short period of time.
For all these reasons, members of the Department of Telematic Crimes of the Central Operative Unit of the Guardia Civil, responsible for the investigation, were forced to implement a series of measures aimed at provoking a total blockade of the same that would be effective and definitive, currently being the web pages inaccessible or lacking download links.
Many of these web pages have been monitored by agents on a permanent basis, in some cases getting these domains blocked sometimes in less than three hours.
