The fight against online copyright infringement seems to have had a steep rise with the approaching Christmas holidays.
After the Avaxhome case, now it’s the Vallo della Lucania public prosecutor’s office that intervenes to block the websites torrentreactor.net and torrents.net, accused of spreading pirated material.
Torrents are actually neutral communications protocols through which anything can be exchanged, including legit material. The peculiarity of torrents is that the file is not physically hosted in a single server, rather it is stored in different places that can be reached using the torrent instructions. This system is also widely used by Linux developers that can easily find and transmit whatever they need without violating the law.
Portals like torrentreactor.net are big torrent search engines, but there is not a direct match so everything that is torrent is necessarily illicit, quite another thing is true. Therefore actions like the ones above must be carefully assessed. The public prosecutor’s office probably saw that the two portals eased the exchange of pirated material, and for this reason, blocked any access to it.
In the press release dated 4th December 2012, the Italian finance police stated:
«The investigations on the pirate portal “TORRENTREACTOR.NET” allowed us to confirm that the website (located in Ukraine) occupies the 201st position in the most visited websites list in Italy, having 600,000 unique accesses and over 4 million pages seen per month, situating our country — along with India — as the first one for number of accesses, equal to the 14% of the total. The illegally available copyrighted works were assessed at 1,695,907 and an estimation revealed profits amounting to $4,700 per day, thanks to advertisement, adding up to 5,164,560 of US dollars in total. The website “TORRENTS.NET” (located in Sweden) occupies the 576th position in the aforementioned list, having 320,000 accesses and 3 million pages seen per month, situating our contry at the 2nd place, equal to the 12,2% of the total. For this counterfeit market, the illegally accessible copyrighted works amounted to 788,252, estimating $3,200 per day, adding up to 3,562,920 of US dollars in total.»