Bullet-Proof In Kiev

The more western European governments try to close legal loopholes and clamp down on illegal file-sharing, the more the pirates are seeking new territories where they can avoid prosecution.

That’s the view of Rob Holmes of Texas law firm IP Cybercrime, who told UK newspaper The Guardian it’s a situation that’s leading to the creation of “bullet-proof strongholds.”

“There will always be a place to run to,” he explained. “It goes back to the speakeasies in the 1920s – when one place got busted, they would just congregate in another place.”

Since last year’s Pirate Bay case, when a Swedish court found four men guilty of breaking copyright law, the site has moved its Web servers to Ukraine.

Demonoid, another popular file-sharing service that began in Serbia, has also relocated to Kiev.

“Ukrainian communications law, as they paraphrase it, says that providers are not responsible for what their customers do,” explained John Robinson of BigChampagne, a Los Angeles-based media tracking service.

Although China can claim to be tough on Internet crime in the sense that hacking potentially carries a death sentence, the authorities aren’t known for cooperating with other countries when it comes to trying to take action against any high-tech criminals based there.

Research published last year showed that most bullet-proof hosts have shifted to China, where criminals are able to take advantage of low costs and legal loopholes to avoid prosecution.

A study of online crime conducted by the University of Alabama showed that more than 22,000 sites that sent pharmaceutical spam were hosted by six bullet-proof servers in China.