The owner of an illegal content website that has been operating since 1999 has been arrested by the Malaysian Government. The suspect, owner of the website www.jiwang.org was caught at his house during a June 11 raid in Kubang Kerian, Kelantan.
Dubbed Ops Skyfall, the raid team was led by the Ministry of Domestic Trade, Cooperatives and Consumerism(MDTCC) after five months of surveillance.
As part of the operation, MDTCC confiscated computers and related equipment worth some RM30,000 including:
- 1 unit of CPU
- 2 unit of Laptops
- 4 unit of hardisk
- 3 unit of broadband modem
- 5 unit of thumdrive
- 6 unit of memory cards
- 3 tablets
Despite the raid, the website jiwang.org remains online. TheTechInsider located the server which is hosted at France. The server is also hosting the domain jiwang.net including two other sub domains.
The download section of Jiwang.org used to offer thousands of music download including Malay songs, Indonesian, Singapore, Brunei, Japan, Korea, among others.
At the point of writing however, the music database at the download section of Jiwang.org appears to have “disappeared” despite a cache copy of the page can still be found here. Attempts to download mp3 links obtained from the cached file were unsuccessful.
TheTechInsider contacted MDTCC and was told that the site Jiwang.org will first be block in Malaysia via SKMM and the Ministry will attempt the seize the servers which are located in France. However the investigating officer were unable to provide us a time line on when this would happen.
We also discovered the domain http://torrent.jiwang.cc/, possibly operated by the same owner. This site is basically a torrent tracking/seeding site and currently offers more than 47,000 files, last checked. The Jiwang.cc domain is hosted in Sweden.
According to the Recording Industry Association of Malaysia chief executive officer Tan Ngiap Foo, Jiwang.org had practically every single album of Malay artists published in Malaysia.
“We haven’t really counted how many songs are available, but you have everything from Siti Nurhaliza to P. Ramlee. We estimate that copyright holders have suffered at least RM10mil in losses over the past five years,” he said in a report on TheStar. The article can be found here[link].
TheTechInsider will be contacting MDTCC to follow the progress on the investigation.
[Download PDF]– Press Release in BM, Ops Skyfall by MDTCC
