Police have shut down a vital hub on a major peer-to-peer network in a move heralded by the film industry as a "major victory" in the fight against online piracy.

Swiss and Belgian police raided the home of the operator of Razorback2, a server with around 1.3 million users on the eDonkey filesharing network.

Film studios said Razorback2 had been instrumental in distributing over 1,270m files, including copyrighted movies, TV shows, software and games, even though it offered a searchable index of places where users could obtain content rather than offering content itself.

"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," the Motion Picture Association of America said in a statement

Record companies have blamed illegal peer-to-peer sharing for a downturn in CD sales and Hollywood is anxious to prevent a similar fate befalling the sale of DVDs.

Since 2004, when it upped its fight against online piracy, the MPAA said it had shut all the US servers feeding the eDonkey service and was now extending that to Europe.

"Razorback2 was not just an enormous index for internet users engaged in illegal file-swapping, it was a menace to society," said the MPAA's worldwide anti-piracy director, John Malcolm.

However, peer-to-peer supporters questioned the strategy, saying people were simply migrating to other more decentralised file-sharing services.

"The disappearance of Razorback will change absolutely nothing to the millions of eMule users, who already benefit from an entirely decentralised network called "Kad," said the influential P2pnet website.

Another user, posting on the site, describing the MPAA's actions as the equivalent of playing "whack a mole".

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