By Kim Tong-hyung



Police are investigating more than 50 file-sharing enthusiasts as part of a crackdown against online piracy, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism said Thursday.



Authorities so far have booked 12 operators of some of the country's largest peer-to-peer file sharing websites and 41 of their biggest customers, who have each uploaded more than 1,000 ''seed'' files to these websites in the five months through May.



They also raided the offices of 26 hosting companies, looking for servers connected to copyright infringement as they clamp down harder on the unlawful movement of movies, music and games. This is the nation's first strike targeted at ''torrenting.''



A large quantity of illegal transfers of video and music content are downloaded as ''torrent'' files. Unlike old file-sharing sites such as the now defunct Napster, there is no central information hub for torrent files and this decentralized system makes it popular among Internet users because it's more difficult for authorities to crack down on instances of file sharing.



Torrenting has become an increasing headache for the entertainment and software industries because file-sharing activities have become supercharged with an explosion in the market for mobile Internet devices such as smartphones and touch-screen tablets.



When announcing the details of the recent crackdown, which was assisted by information from the Korea Copyright Commission, a sub-unit of the culture ministry, officials hoped to raise awareness among Internet users that torrenting is no longer a safe activity for them.



Search-and-destroy missions on torrenting continue to be difficult, but it's also clear that anti-piracy technologies are beginning to catch up, officials said.



''Considering the nature of how torrenting works, passive actions such as just downloading a few movies could possibly make Internet users punishable for acting as up-loaders,'' a ministry official said.



According to the copyright commission, 10 torrenting sites run by the 12 operators had 3.78 million subscribers and 2.38 million illegal files for sharing. The commission estimated 866.7 billion won (about $768 million) worth of copyrighted files was infringed upon because those files were downloaded 715 million times.



According to the Film Federation Against Piracy, more than 3.8 million torrent files of movies, television dramas, games and music were downloaded through 62 file-sharing sites last week alone, costing copyright holders up to 84 billion won ($77 million) in damages. About 800,000 of these files were movies, representing intellectual property losses of around 2.2 billion won.







