TEN people have been arrested in five regions, the Balearics among them, and 21 web pages offering 40 percent of the pirate downloads of music and films on the net have been closed.
This was done in an operation by the Technology Investigation Brigade. The 10 arrested people have been released with charges and have no previous police record, according to Joan Mesquida, director general of the National Police Force and the Guardia Civil. He added that his was a pioneering operation at international level, as it is the first time it has been proved that the administrators of these websites were the ones who recorded the films and distributed them via the net.
The website recorded 15'000 downloads from the more than half a million hits it received daily, and a conservative estimate of the profits made by the owners is 625'000 euros.