Team AlexandriZ

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

~ the obituary ~

This one was locked behind a language rather than a border. Team AlexandriZ released French-language books to people who read French, and I do not, so the catalog was never going to reach me no matter what my connection was. The part that translates is the method, because it is the same method the Turkish subtitle scene used in exactly the same years, and I did know that one.

The group was a release team in the scene sense of the word. Fifteen to twenty anonymous members, no public faces, a numbered series, and a quality bar. They stripped protection off ebooks that were already digital, and where no ebook existed they scanned the printed book and corrected the text by hand afterward, which is the slow part and the part that separated them from a torrent dump. The output was clean files, consistently named, with a house format. Their own count came to 2,526 titles over roughly four years. The court that eventually heard the case counted more than 23,942 books between May 2010 and June 2013, a figure that includes everything moving through the surrounding forum as well.

On 8 November 2012 the Syndicat national de l'édition, the French publishers' union, announced a counterfeiting action alongside Hachette, Editis, Gallimard, Albin Michel, La Martinière and Actes Sud. The group kept releasing for another nine months. Its Twitter account went quiet on 18 June 2013, and on 31 August 2013 it posted that it had serious problems and was forced to suspend, citing security and adding that it did not know how long the situation would last. It never came back.

~ the case file ~

~ the last two files ~

The final releases were Pot-Bouille and Nana, both by Émile Zola, both in the public domain and both perfectly legal to distribute. A group facing a counterfeiting prosecution signed off with two books nobody could prosecute them for. Whether that was a joke or a habit of finishing what they started, it is the detail everyone who wrote about the shutdown kept.

~ the trial ~

The case took nine years. Twelve people went before the fifteenth correctional chamber of the Nanterre judicial court, and on 14 May 2021 nine were convicted of counterfeiting with the aggravating circumstance of an organized group. The sentences ran from two to ten months, all suspended, and each of the nine was ordered to pay 10,000 euros to each publisher involved and to the union.

No prison was actually served. What the publishers wanted out of it was the finding, and they got it: a court in France saying in plain language that this was organized counterfeiting rather than a hobby.

~ what carried on without them ~

The files did not go anywhere. A successor site under the name Eurybiade was still circulating around 2,500 of the releases years after the group was gone, which is the outcome every one of these prosecutions produces. You can convict the people who made the files. You cannot convict a file that has been copied ten thousand times, and the release format the group standardized outlived the group by a decade.

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