An alleged criminal network of copyright infringing hackers, mainly responsible for pirating movies and hosting illegal digital content worldwide, was dismantled in a co-ordinated action between US authorities and their counterparts in 18 countries around the world, with Europol and Eurojust support. On August 25, 60 servers were taken down in North America, Europe and Asia and several of the main suspects were arrested.
The Sparks Group obtained DVDs and Blu-ray discs of unreleased content and compromised the copyright protections on the discs to reproduce and upload the content publicly to online servers. It is believed that the piracy group, under investigation since September 2016, had successfully reproduced and disseminated hundreds of movies and TV programmes prior to their retail release date, including nearly every movie released by major production studios in the US. The Sparks Group has caused tens of millions of US dollars in losses to film production studios, mainly to the US movie, television and supporting industries, from the copyright infringement.
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