French authorities close down torrent site T411

[Len]

Google Translation:

Several people were arrested in France and Sweden during an investigation over T411, one of the main French-language download sites.

The site T411 is inaccessible since Sunday 25 June in the evening following a Swedish police operation, according to the Swedish reference daily Dagens Nyheter and the information of the World.

This site - one of the most recent BitTorrent Francophone link directories, offering a catalog of links to download movies, games and music, without hosting the files itself - was the subject of a complaint by the Society of Composers And music publishers (Sacem) in 2014 for organized band counterfeiting. The Association against Audio-Piracy (ALPA) then lodged a complaint.

The investigation, conducted by the specialized inter-regional jurisdiction (JIRS) of Rennes, has been entrusted to the research section of Rennes and has lasted for several months. Six people were arrested Tuesday morning in France, according to Sacem secretary general David El-Sayegh, interviewed by Le Monde. They would be "supermodbers," he said. "Their role was to look at the contents made available on the site, to remove false content and to moderate the forums. "

Two arrests in Sweden

The French investigators also sought the help of the Swedish police. The latter arrested two people in a compound in the southern suburbs of Stockholm, suspected of being the administrators of the site, the Swedish prosecutor told Agence France-Presse. They are not French, but according to Dagens Nyheter, two Ukrainian citizens with a residence permit in Sweden, arrested in the presence of French gendarmes. They should be charged for violations of copyright law and money laundering.

A computer company was also searched by Swedish law enforcement agencies to procure the server from which T411 was administered. The case could also extend to Canada, where suspects are believed to live from site administrators, according to David El-Sayegh. He estimated the damage suffered by the authors represented by Sacem "to 3 million euros" and evaluated "the gain realized by the administrators of the site to the amount of 6 million euros".

The latter, who usually announced his maintenance in advance, had suddenly disappeared on Sunday, giving rise to a rumor that the administrators had been arrested by Canadian police.

The site obliges its users to respect a sharing ratio - in order to download large files, it is also necessary to leave its own files available, under penalty of being banned from the site. In the hours following the site closure, several clones of T411 have been posted online, but appear to be mere copies designed to steal the passwords of people signing up.