At least one person on the team of Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN must have thought "kick'm while they're down!" when they decided to try and lean on the Bulgarian police to clamp down on torrent sites in the country.

Or were they simply being blatantly opportunistic? Did they really think this could be a win-win situation in which both BREIN and the Bulgarian police could score points in their collective fight against large-scale organised crime?

The eagerness on the Bulgarian side to achieve results they can boast about is understandable after it had been told off by the European Commission for the so-many-eth time about its failures.

But why would BREIN be interested in torrent sites that mainly serve a Bulgarian audience? Most of the servers targeted by BREIN and the police are available in Bulgarian only, a language that is spoken by even fewer people than Dutch, and these torrent sites are aimed at a Bulgarian audience.

BREIN, on the other hand, represents producers and distributors of the entertainment industry in The Netherlands.

Could it be that, unknown to us, Dutch film and music is, in fact, extremely popular with the Bulgarian download-crowd?

Dutch film is hardly popular in The Netherlands, but would a Bulgarian audience have even less taste than the Dutch?

Apart from a few internationally renown DJs, whom almost no one knows to be Dutch in the first place, hardly anyone in Bulgaria knows any Dutch music or films because it is not legally available here.

Or could it be that it is simply a lot cheaper and easier for BREIN to outsource its harassment of website administrators to underpaid Bulgarian policemen who are all too eager to score points?

A significant part of these Bulgarian torrent sites were, until now, actually hosted in The Netherlands. Assuming that Bulgarian police are as lazy and inefficient as they are made out to be and assuming that BREIN actually wanted to achieve real results, not just newspaper headlines for a couple of days, wouldn't it make a lot more sense to send a cease-and-desist letter to the hosting company in The Netherlands? After all, it would not be the first time BREIN would send this hosting company such letters. It would be more expensive as well, I'm sure.

And BREIN would have to quote an actual law that was being violated.

Luckily, Bulgarian police are not such nitpickers to ask about silly little details like that.

Instead, Bulgarian police could be trusted to act like an old-fashioned bobby or veldwachter would have. They would call the naughty boys in for a good spankin' to set them straight and send them off to their mummies crying.

But what if the Bulgarian police would, miraculously, decide it wanted to get serious about a crackdown on piracy in the country?

Why would they need BREIN for that?

All they need to do is go to the website of the fan club of the country's prime minister (http://redfen.net) where the audio, video and photo sections are filled to the brim with pirated material.