Spanish police shut down 23 illegal download sites

Operation Cascada ('Waterfall') has targeted sites where music, films, serials and video games are distributed via peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing networks from computers without fixed servers or IP addresses.

These unauthorised free downloads are a breach of copyright and cause financial loss to writers, musicians, directors, actors and other persons involved who would normally be paid royalties.

In fact, prolific Spanish novelist Lucía Etxebarría – author of a long string of profound 'chick-lit' works well-known for their mixture of stream-of-consciousness and gritty realism through observing society's hang-ups and plumbing psychological depths – said over a year ago that she did not plan to write any more books as she was earning nothing from them thanks to illegal downloads.

And until they become world-famous, authors and artists in general make very little money from their work.

According to the Guardia Civil, the domain names blocked so far – some very recently created and a few not even launched in Spain yet – had very high traffic with hundreds or thousands of daily hits.

Three of them – Divxtotal.com, Estrenosdtl.com and Gamestorrents.com – were set up by an undisclosed Spaniard who sold them to a firm based in Argentina.

Hiding server locations to prevent their sites being shut down is one of the most common tactics used by those setting up pirate download pages, say police – software exists which 'shields' IP addresses and changes them constantly so they come up in different countries worldwide.

This means some sites blocked go live again within a matter of hours with near-identical names.

Others were set up to allow them to bypass closure by outside sources time and time again, meaning cyber-experts within the police force specialising in online crimes had to find ways of blocking them for good.

Many pirate sites are set up using the 'deep web' – one of the most popular being The Onion Route or TOR.

Whilst the 'deep web' is sometimes used for harmless ends such as expats' hiding the country their IP address is based in to be able to access TV catch-up services from their home nation, it is also popular with terrorists, organised criminal gangs and child porn networks as they are extremely difficult to trace, even by experts in internet crime.

Those who set up illegal download sites do not charge for the downloads themselves, but earn their money through advertising on their pages.