Razorback2 was a
server (195.245.244.243) of the
eDonkey network, known for being able to handle 1 million users simultaneously, meaning that it had capacity for 1.3 million users and was indexing around 170 million files.
Use of the Server
- Use by Ratiatum.com, a website about p2p for legal program sharing like Free software or other.
- The server was also an index server and so it indexed all content including illegal content, according to Maître Sébastien Fanti this was legal in all European countries. In the past the principal administrator did offer to blacklist illegal content if the author of the content asked him to do so, but no one asked.
Confiscation by the police
On
21 February 2006, the servers located in a
Belgian datacenter were confiscated by the Belgian police, and their operator, who lives in
Switzerland, was arrested. This was done after a local judge authorized the confiscation at the datacenter in
Zaventem near
Brussels, after a denouncement of the
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), in collaboration with the
International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. After the police shut down the site and confiscated the servers however, , it has even grown 20% since then.
The
MPAA Chairman and CEO
Dan Glickman, presented this raid as a "major victory":
Since the confiscation, the owner was released, and the trial has not started yet.
Besides having Razorback's equipment confiscated and their site shut down, copyright enforcement entities such as MPAA and
IFPI have set up several "Razorback2" fake servers online, with the purpose of mimicking the original servers but which yield no useful results, hampering file-sharing traffic. Afterwards, the Swiss anti-piracy tech firm Logistep SA was hired to help further intimidate and prosecute filesharing users.
The raid on Razorback2 was part of a series of raids on
peer-to-peer file sharing websites or
BitTorrent trackers initiated by the
MPAA. Another well publicised example is the raid on
The Pirate Bay in
Sweden that took place on May 31st, 2006.
