German police search houses for illegal e-books

The German police have searched about fifty houses in a case against a webshop where illegal e-books were sold. The website has since been taken down, as has a related blog. No one has been arrested yet.

In total, this concerns 45 to 50 house searches, Der Spiegel reports. Both sites, Ebookspender.me and the related blog Spiegelbest.me, have been offline since Wednesday. Ebookspender gave access to more than fifty thousand German-language illegal e-books for five euros per month; the site was touted on the related blog.

During the searches, computers, telephones, tablets, e-readers and hard drives were seized. One person has been identified as a suspect, but the police have not yet been able to arrest him. According to a lawyer for one of the people who was searched, his client was only a ‘customer’ of the platform and he did not upload anything himself.