This article talks about Serbia’a surprising progress in combating piracy. The Serbian authorities have seized “280,000 illegal copies of music, films, games and software” from the domestic market. The article points out that this raid was most likely because Serbia wants to join the E.U and combating piracy is one of the criteria for closer relations between the European Union and Serbia.
    This source is closely tied to the article on Russia’s music download website. The Serbian case, however, has a more optimistic outcome. While the raid will certainly not stop piracy, it is an important step forward that shows the population that the Serbian authorities are serious about strengthening their relations with the E.U. and are therefore willing to carry out seizures of illegal materials. The article also explicitly brings up the ties between piracy and organized crime. Knowing the political and social climate of Eastern Europe, I can confidently claim that the same connection exists in Russia and is evident in the symbolic closure of allofmp3.com. When the exact terms of the ACTA are negotiated, it is important to take into consideration the domestic implications of combating intellectual property infringement. Enforcement of copyright laws can be dangerous since it interferes with powerful underground crime networks whose bosses maintain close connections to corrupt officials within Eastern European police authorities. Finally, the limitation of this article is that it does not investigate the reaction of the population and whether the seizure was successful in the long term, i.e. did the vendors stop selling illegal materials for good or did they continue after a few days.