Police close pirated movies website in Germany

Jun 8, 2011, 17:26 GMT

Berlin - German police closed down Wednesday a pirated movies website that had been drawing 4 million users a day and arrested 13 people on suspicion of breaching film copyright.

The German-language site, kino.to, used a web domain registered in the Pacific kingdom of Tonga, but users could click through to servers in Europe that streamed top-flight movies and TV series.

'I liked it because I wanted to see shows when I liked and in the original English,' one disappointed teenaged user said after finding the site was dead.

Police raided 20 offices, homes and server farms around Germany to confiscate kino.to assets. Sites in France and Spain were also raided.

The young user said his guess was that the operation was funded by charging for access to pornography and gaming also on the portal. There was no charge to view the 'free' US television series.

Germans have been avid users of a series of bootleg entertainment sites down the years, beginning with the original peer-to-peer file-sharing service Napster a decade ago, but each has eventually been blocked after US or European investigations.

Wolfgang Klein, a public prosecutor in Dresden, said kino.to had been getting 4 million hits per day. The inquiry began several months ago with a complaint by an entertainment industry group, the Society for the Prosecution of Copyright Infringement GVU.

Klein said that although kino.to seemed to be a mere listings site, there was an organizational link between it and the other websites that actually streamed the movies and shows to viewers. Most of the servers were in Europe.

He said the company's revenues had exceeded 1 million euros (1.5 million dollars) and the legally defined harm to the movie industry was a similar amount. A 14th suspect was still being sought.