In the wake of European Union criticism of Bulgaria's police and judiciary, Dutch anti-piracy organisation BREIN (brain) is allegedly pressuring to close so-called torrent websites in the country, local media reported, quoting a publication on website torrentfreak.com.

A specialised department of the Bulgarian police has tracked down the owners and administrators of several of the larger P2P websites in the country, including those that were hosted elsewhere.

The owners and adminstrators were invited for a talk at the police station, where they were allegedly told to shut down their servers. According to torrentfreak.com, "there were no explanations as to why they should, or which laws were being put into effect, but the order was clear - shut down the sites or the police will come and take the servers. "

Torrent sites are a type of peer-to-peer (P2P) servers that maintain indexed databases of files available on other computers, in the case of torrents on the computers of individual users.
P2P software can be used to transfer any file between two computers running P2P software, without the use of a server. This has made the servers, which only contain indexes of files on other computers, hard to prosecute for organisations like BREIN.

Despite the fact that any type of file can be transferred using P2P software, BREIN and other similar organisation have long argued that their use for pirating copy-righted material is so widespread that this type of software ought to be outlawed.

"I doubt all this will lead to any significant success," Bulgarian daily Monitor quoted Dimitar Ganchev, manager of bol.bg, one of the country's largest internet providers, as saying. "So far they have not found a law under which torrent sites as such would be illegal. They should prosecute the users who share copy-righted material, and not these sites," Ganchev was quoted as saying.

"Interestingly, no one knows on what grounds these sites are forced to close. And we all remember how little happened when two years ago the police targetted torrent sites," Ganchev said.

One of the sites that was forced to close was ArenaBG.com, once thought to be one of the larger European torrent sites and which until now was hosted in The Netherlands. According to Torrentfreak.com, it seemed ArenaBG was already setting up a new torrent site.