To avoid blocking measures put in place by Internet operators, YggTorrent now only accepts registered members. But you’ll have to wait a bit to register.
A few weeks ago, French justice required Internet service providers (ISPs like Bouygues, Free, Orange and SFR) to block a long list of pirate sites offering illegal copies of content for downloading or streaming (see our article). This decision followed a complaint following a joint complaint from several audiovisual production companies and organizations defending rights holders (Gaumont, Disney, the National Federation of Film Publishers, the National Center for Cinema and Animated Images , the Union of Cinema Producers, etc.).
Among the sites hit by this measure was YggTorrent, a French-speaking torrent “tracker” well known to specialists, which succeeded the closure of the famous T411 in 2017. Attracting several million visitors each month, YggTorrent is even a reference for amateurs by offering new links every day to share files of all kinds in torrents (films, series, software, games, music, etc.). And like all sites of the same type, it had until then had the habit of regularly changing its address (URL) to escape the blocking measures to which it was often subject (see our article).
But this time, its administrators took a more original and much more radical decision: to make YggTorrent private. In short, limit access to registered “members”, that is to say users who have created a personal account. A simple procedure (just choose a nickname and a password and indicate an email address), but not free since you have to pay a fee of 19.99 euros via PayPal (one time)! This could well reduce the enthusiasm of fans of pirate downloads, who are inherently unaccustomed to paying anything…
And as if this entry ticket were not enough, new registrations seem blocked for the moment, access to YggTorrent being limited to only members already registered (who still represent some six million users), as reported the specialized site TorrentFreak. Newcomers will therefore have to wait until further notice before being able to indulge in the joys of the torrents.
It is therefore difficult to say today if this new method will be enough to escape the wrath of justice and rights holders, the fact of going private allowing in theory to escape the radar. But it is not certain that the pricing measure will be to everyone’s taste, especially since many other competing pirate sites are still accessible for free.