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The server had indexed some 170 million files that were being shared by as many as 1.3 million simultaneous users, the majority of whom were based in Europe, according to figures from the Motion Picture Association, a movie industry pressure group.

'This is a major victory in our fight to cut off the supply of illegal materials being circulated on the Internet via peer-to-peer networks,' said MPA chairman Dan Glickman. 'By shaving the illegal traffic of copyrighted works facilitated by Razorback2, we are depleting other illegal networks of their ability to supply Internet pirates with copyrighted works which is a positive step in our international effort to fight piracy.'

Swiss police arrested the site's operator at home while Belgian police seized the site's servers located at an Internet hosting center in Zaventem, Brussels. The MPA said that since November

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of 2004, authorities have closed down all of the major eDonkey servers in the United States and, with this action, Europe.

'The operators of Razorback2 had clear financial motives,' it said in statement. 'In addition to collecting "donations" from users, revenue was also generated through the sale of advertising on the site, usually promoting pornographic websites. In addition, the availability of offensive content will be inhibited. The operators of this eDonkey site chose not to exercise control over files being traded by users which including those containing child pornography, bomb-making instructions and terrorist training videos.'

Pro-file sharing site p2p.net disagreed, saying that Razorback2 did not host any illicit content and instead was participating 'very actively' in the distribution of legal content from Ratiatum's download network and Jamendo's free music.

It pointed out that while the server used for eMule and eDonkey was indexing millions of files swapped on P2P networks, a large part of which was illicit, the main Razorback administrator had said he was willing to blacklist files reported to him by copyright holders, but no one replied to the offer.

'Razorback was participating in numerous legal projects, providing marketers with precious network usage statistics, and even by distributing DRM protected files for content providers,' said Ratiatum's Guillaume Champeau.