The creators of the famous torrent link site, which allowed illegal downloading of films, series, music and video games, have just been fined 989 million euros. A condemnation of exceptional magnitude in France!
Bad times for illegal download services! After the closure of Uptobox, one of the most used platforms for storing and sharing pirated content, following a police raid (see our article), it is the turn of the T411 fire, permanently closed in 2017, to suffer the consequences of the fight against piracy. On October 13, 2023, the Rennes criminal court imposed a record fine of 491 million euros on the administrators of the torrent directory, which allowed the downloading of films, series and musical albums, as reported the Informed. Never before has a conviction of this magnitude been handed down in France in such a case. A decision commensurate with the popularity of the platform, with justice seeking to make an example of T411.
T411: the end of the Torrent yellow pages
The origins of T411, which was then called QuebecTorrent, date back to 2006. Nicknamed “the yellow pages of Torrent”, the service functioned like a directory, bringing together thousands of links leading to small torrent files. By opening them, we could then retrieve voluminous content of all kinds, such as films, series, video games, music or even books. Exchanges took place directly between Internet users, the site only served as an intermediary, like a sort of piracy hub. T411 quickly became very popular, boasting millions of members, while peer-to-peer hacking (peer to peer) was popular, right in the face of Hadopi, the ephemeral and above all ineffective tool of the Government to try to stem piracy. Over the years, administrators change domain names, hosting countries and clone their site to counter blockages.
In September 2014, the public prosecutor’s office of the specialized inter-regional jurisdiction of Rennes (JIRS) opened a judicial investigation into charges of counterfeiting, criminal conspiracy and money laundering against the site. In 2014, French justice forced Internet service providers to block its addresses, without much success, and the cat and mouse game continued. The adventure finally ended in 2017 with the intervention of the Swedish police, who obtained the physical closure of the torrent directory and arrested the main administrator. In total, since its launch, the site has generated several million euros in revenue, particularly from advertising revenue.
Two defendants were targeted aware of the affair: Mr. Jolicoeur, creator of the site, and Mr. Voitenko, system administrator. In addition to the 489 million in damages – 471 million euros for the cinema sector, including Gaumont, Pathé, UGC, Warner and Film24, and 18 million euros for the music sector, mainly via the Société des authors, composers and music publishers (Sacem) – the creator of the site receives three years in prison and a fine of 150,000 euros, and the administrator receives eighteen months in prison, thirteen of which are suspended. The latter, present at the trial and having already served five months of imprisonment, was free to leave, while an arrest warrant was issued for his partner, currently a refugee in Canada. This is the heaviest sentence ever handed down in France for a case of illegal downloading. Mr. Voitenko is already planning to appeal.