In what could well be Europe’s largest piracy-related bust, Dresden Chief Prosecutor’s Office carried out a coordinated large-scale operation against the biggest German-language portal for pirated films, kino.to. Under the responsibility of the state of Saxony’s Integrated Investigation Unit (INES), police officers in Germany, Spain, France, Russia and the Netherlands raided numerous residences and offices.

In Germany alone, more than 250 police officers and tax investigators as well as 17 data specialists simultaneously searched over 20 residences, offices and data centres across the country. The police arrested 13 persons, and is searching for one additional suspect. It also seized the kino.to domain name. Several ‘streamhosters’, servers on which the accessible pirated copies are stored, were taken offline by the authorities.

Kino.to hosted no content itself, but indexed material stored on file-hosters. It attracted four million visitors a day. The legal basis on which the raid was carried out was on charges of “establishing an organised crime syndicate for the purpose of violation of copyrights on a commercial scale,” as the Dresden Chief Prosecutor’s office explained in its press release.

The investigation was initiated through criminal charges filed by Germany’s Federation Against Copyright Theft (GVU) on 28 April, following years of preliminary investigation into kino.to. “GVU’s research on the kino.to system indicated a parasitic business model based on a division of labour, which was created solely for the purpose of generating illegal profits for all the parties involved, based on systematic infringement of copyright and related rights,” says GVU.

GVU analyses indicate that the kino.to service has been generating "considerable amounts of income" by selling ads on its portal site and on the hosts’ homepages, as well as through subscriptions to premium access for frequent users.

The MPAA had kino.to on top of its target list for some time. “This linking site specializes in illegally making available large amounts of copyrighted cinema films and TV series in German and other languages. There are currently over 300,000 infringing TV shows and over 66,000 infringing movies available,” the MPAA wrote at the time.

TorrentFreak reports that last month an Austrian ISP was served with a preliminary injunction forcing it to block subscriber access to Kino.to following complaints from Verein für Anti-Piraterie der österreichischen Film und Videobranche (VAP) – the anti-piracy association of the Austrian film and video industry.

Story filed 08.06.11