site.btaCyber Police Stops Illegal Distribution of TV Content

Officers of the Cybercrime Directorate, together with their colleagues from the Vratsa and Pleven sectors of the Directorate General for Combating Organized Crime (DGCOC), conducted an operation to prevent illegal use of TV series as objects of copyright and related rights through the website tvseriali.bg. The actions were implemented on Thursday under the guidance of the Sofia Regional Prosecutor's Office, the Interior Ministry said.

During the check, the special police identified the owner of the site. It was found out that through this site the man had provided access to numerous TV series, the distribution and broadcasting rights of which belong to two Bulgarian media companies. The series were retransmitted from videos uploaded to a Russian video content hosting site. It was found that the videos containing copyright and related rights were also distributed by other users of the site, and the most active ones were identified.

Access to the tvseriali.bg website has been suspended due to the discovery of numerous infringements of intellectual property rights and with a view to their termination. In the course of the actions, documents and digital devices through which the illegal retransmission took place were seized.

The operation was carried out in the framework of EMPACT, the European Multidisciplinary Platform against Criminal Threats. Bulgaria, in particular the DGCOC, leads the priority activity of combating and disrupting criminal networks and criminal activities of individual entrepreneurs involved in intellectual property crime.