Never seen before in France. The Rennes Criminal Court has just severely hit the administrators of the Canadian pirate site T411, a directory of torrent links which allowed you to download films and series for free. As revealed by L’Informé, the judges in fact estimated the civil parties’ damages at 489 million euros!
A sum which must be shared – if the damages are properly paid – between the cinema industry (471 million euros) and the music industry (18 million euros). The criminal court also, on October 13, sentenced the founder of the site, a Canadian absent from the trial, to three years in prison and 150,000 euros. He is now the subject of an international arrest warrant.
Complaint in 2014
The second defendant, a Ukrainian living in Sweden who had been extradited to France, received a prison sentence of 18 months, 13 of which were suspended, accompanied by a fine of 150,000 euros. But he will also have to pay: he was declared liable for 30% of the damages. The T411 site was closed by the French and Swedish police in June 2017.
The police operation followed a complaint in 2014 for organized counterfeiting of Sacem (Society of authors, composers and music publishers) and Alpa (Association for the fight against audiovisual piracy). As Le Monde explained at the time, six people were then arrested, including four in France, “super moderators”. According to Sacem, their role was “to look at the content made available on the site, to remove false content and to moderate the forums”.
Appeared in 2006
The judicial dragnet had followed a game of cat and mouse. The courts had in fact blocked a first site, T411.me, pushing the administrators to register on another domain name, T411.io. At the time, the damage suffered by the authors represented by Sacem was estimated at 3 million euros, while the gain made by the administrators was estimated at 6 million euros.
The T411 sharing site appeared on the web in 2006. The fall of this very popular directory was quickly filled by clones, such as YggTorrent. Other sites imitating T411 had also emerged, but this time for malicious purposes, initially aiming to steal identifiers from Internet users.