A recent court decision required Internet operators to block many popular pirate sites in France. But they always remain accessible, and very easily!
The fight against Internet piracy is an endless war between two camps: on the “dark” side, a host of sites that illegally offer all kinds of copied content (films, TV series, software and apps, games, music, digital books …) direct download, torrent or streaming; and on the “bright” side, publishing companies, professional federations, organizations for the defense of rights holders and authorities, who ensure respect for the law and intellectual works.
For years, this fierce fight has taken the form of a game of hide and seek. And despite all the measures put in place by rights defenders, it is still very easy to recover pirated content on the Internet. So, as soon as a pirate site is banned from search engines, it reappears with a new address. And it is blocked by the operators by court decision, it still remains accessible!
A new example of this grotesque situation has just been given to us. At the beginning of April 2024, a decision by the Paris Judicial Court required the main French Internet access providers (Bouygues Telecom, Free, Orange and SFR) to block around fifty sites offering pirated content. This measure followed a summons from several audiovisual production companies and organizations defending rights holders (Disney, Gaumont, the National Federation of Film Publishers, the Digital Video Editing Union, the Union of Film Producers cinema, etc.).
However, if the operators have carried out the requested blocking, the incriminated sites are still accessible! Indeed, the classic measure simply consists of blocking addresses in DNS servers, the services that come out of directories to match a URL (an internal address like www.commentcamarche.net) to an IP address (a number like 145.242 .11.75 which corresponds to the “physical” address of the servers).
However, it is very easy to circumvent this type of censorship by changing the DNS settings on a computer or smartphone, as we explain in our practical sheet. This operation, perfectly legal and reversible, is within the reach of anyone. And as we have verified, it allows you to access banned pirate sites without difficulty.
Obviously, this also requires finding the URLs of the sites. And this is the “funniest” part of the story, they are all given clearly in the official court decision ! Simply consult it to have the right addresses for the most popular platforms of the genre, such as Cpasmieux, FrenchStream, Wawacity or Zone-Téléchargement. In short, the hunt for pirates is not about to end…