OMGTorrent

» see omgtorrent.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

OMGTorrent opened in 2009 and by 2015 it was the third-biggest French-language download site by traffic, which in practice meant about 3.5 million visitors a month against a catalog of more than ten thousand films. It was an index rather than a host. The files lived elsewhere and the site's job was to point at them, keep a forum running underneath, and sell the advertising space that all of that attention generated.

On the morning of Tuesday 2 June 2015 it stopped responding. The ads on the page had already broken. Two days later Zataz published the reason: the Section de Recherche of the Gendarmerie Nationale in Reims, working under the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Châlons-en-Champagne, had detained six people connected to the site. The case had been open for roughly a year on a complaint from ALPA and SACEM, the two bodies that handle audiovisual and music rights enforcement in France.

The six were not all equivalent. There was the administrator, 27 years old and posting as Ellash. There was a forum moderator and an unusually active member. The rest were ordinary users who had been identified during the investigation, which is the part of these operations that rarely gets reported and always happens.

~ the dossier ~

~ the belize account ~

The money is what separated OMGTorrent from the hobbyist trackers of the decade before it. Investigators put the administrator's advertising income at more than 8,000 euros a month, of which about 7,000 was being paid into an offshore account in Belize. That is not a server fund. That is a salary, paid out of a French audience, structured to sit outside French reach.

It also meant the man running it was not a first offender. He had already been convicted about five years earlier for the same kind of thing, drawing four months suspended, and had gone back to doing it at a larger scale with better plumbing. Prosecutors notice that sequence.

~ the week he said no ~

A week after the arrests, on 8 June 2015, the administrator went on record saying the site was not closing. The French tech blogs printed it. Then in October he posted again, from outside the country, claiming he had reopened OMGTorrent and had decided not to show up for his own trial.

Neither statement changed anything that mattered. The domain never resumed serving a working index to its old audience, and it resolves to nothing at all now. What the last months of OMGTorrent really were was one person insisting in public that a thing still existed while nobody could reach it.

~ the sentence ~

In February 2017 the Tribunal Correctionnel de Châlons-en-Champagne handed down a year of prison with eight months to be served, around five million euros in damages, and a twelve-month ban on accessing the internet. A 38-year-old moderator received four months suspended. Four visitors were sentenced alongside them.

I was 31 and working in Ankara when this happened, and I did not notice it for a decade. A francophone index is a francophone object: the catalog is in French, the subtitle files are in French, the forum runs in French, and a Turkish engineer has no reason to ever load the page. The part that travels is the enforcement shape, a rights body filing a complaint and a gendarmerie unit taking a year to turn it into six sets of handcuffs, because every country eventually builds its own version of that.

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