Yesterday a fairly sizeable raid on servers hosted in Europe was conducted by police forces.  Officers in Belgium coordinated the raid in multiple other countries including Sweden (of course!), the UK, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Netherlands, and so on.  Interestingly, as TorrentFreak reports, the police actions were directed at SCENE release groups responsible for much of the pirates software, games, audio, and film on the internet.  At the present time, all I can gather via IRC chat, forum surfing, and sources inside seem to indicate that few – if any – individuals participating in casual bittorrent sharing were targeted in this raid. . . . . so, if you’re not a top-level scene releaser (and I doubt those of you reading this are), take a deep breath and just relax! 

That being said, I think there are some other significant things we might draw from this new round of perennial server raids.  First, the focus on P2P crackdowns has shifted away from the end-user and toward the higher-level release groups responsible for the initial distribution of the majority of pirated material on the internet.

the RIAA depiction of the internet piracy hierarchy

While this tactic isn’t completely new (not completely new in the sense that the originating uploader has long been the target of P2P actions), it does highlight the fact that the protectors of the Western culture industries (RIAA, MPAA, BREIN, IFPI, etc.) are no longer pursuing individual end-users with such dogged fanaticism.  Cases like RIAA v. Tenenbaum and Capitol v. Thomas have produced unwanted attention for culture industry watchdogs (and the media companies that support them) by highlighting unabashed greed (I mean $150,000 per song?!? Really?!?!?!?) and fear tactics characteristic of most anti-piracy efforts.  Jessica Reyman has highlighted this trend in her work, noting that the current prosecution/deterrent structure reinforces a notion of cultural production rooted in commodities and the distinction between consumers/produces in the digital marketplace.  Yet, these new raid also draw attention to the fact that culture industry protectors are no longer capable of prosecuting end-users in efforts intentionally designed as fear-producing deterrent; rather, now the tactic has scaled up, targeting the producer-end of the piracy continuum more pointedly thus returning to the anti-piracy efforts used to track and take down large scale counterfeiting operations.

But what of the long-term efficacy of such raids in deterring piracy in the future?  To me there are a couple of things to consider here: hydras, sources, and transnational capital.  The “hydra effect” is not a new internet phenomenon.  In fact, the concept is common in many discussions about organized crime (witness the fear about the decision to remove one centralized Mexican cartel only to have multiple smaller, more ruthless gangs vie for that power/prestige), political economy (the Left’s perpetual question about unified movements or – to use a term from Hardt and Negri – singularities composed in Multitude), and even microfinance (large-scale transnational finance corporations or smaller, localized, decentralized microloan agents).  At its heart the hydra effect is the new economy of micropolitics and plays itself out across many different layers and plateaus.  For the pirates busted in this most recent round of anti-piracy actions, the long hours of work and subterfuge involved in cracking proprietary software and distributing it to the intranets will be remembered through ASCII art and in memoriam pages like those of Alan Ellis of oink.cd; however, new actors in the SCENE will soon swoop in to fill and exceed the shoes of those that came before them.  Motivated by the accrual of black-market social capital and sometimes allied with anticapitalist/copyleft causes, new scenesters radiate outward and rush in, occupying new piratical roles in the microspaces of contest against corporatism and intellectual property (or any property for that matter).  The question for the culture industry protectors (and for statist powers everywhere) now becomes: do you hope to contain the monster by knowing its name or continuously chop off the heads in a Sisyphean battle with the piratical Lyrnaean hydra?

A Sidenote:

All conspiracy theories aside, another interesting aspect of this raid is the fact that Swedish authorities specifically targeted the dedicated server/host provider PRQ . . . perhaps more infamously known as the internet host that provides space/bandwidth for the WikiLeaks organization.  Now I’m merely speculating here and there are numerous tangible reasons why PRQ was targeted (the company’s strong commitment to net neutrality, the fact that the company also hosts high-level SCENE release sites, etc.); however, it is a little surprising that a raid of the company’s servers comes hot on the heels of the WikiLeaks July posting of 91,000+ military reports from the Afghan war.  Though initial reports of the raids played up the WikiLeaks-PRQ connection, little connection has been substantiated and Swedish police (Swedish prosecutor Frederick Ingblad) have even dismissed the accusation stating, “I can confirm that [this operation] is not about WikiLeaks.”