TNTVillage

» see tntvillage.scambioetico.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The logo carried a slogan: il P2P non è un crimine. TNTVillage was an Italian torrent forum that spent fourteen years arguing that sentence in public, with a written statute about what it would share and a founder who put his own name on the domain registration. The publishers took him at his word and sued him personally.

It started in the spring of 2005. The Milan court's ruling has Luigi Di Liberto and a few others building the platform in March of that year, and the site's own database has its first release dated 4 April. The domain, scambioetico.org, was registered in his name on 12 May. Press obituaries said 2004, and the site never corrected them. The forum ran on a heavily modified Invision board behind an MKPortal skin, with tracker statistics pasted into the bottom of every release post, and it was known for concurrent-user limits and closed registrations as much as for what was on it.

The point of the place was Italian. Dubbed films and Italian books, the things the international trackers did not carry, which is also the whole reason I never needed a login there. I knew the name the way you know the big national trackers of other countries, from the TorrentFreak lists, and not from the inside.

By August 2019 the front page counted more than 610,000 members. FAPAV, the anti-piracy federation, put the active releasers at over 2,900 and the traffic at close to six million visits a month. At 12:45 on 30 August the team took everything offline and left one page behind, and the page told anyone who was a smanettone, a tinkerer, to go and download a dump.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the eighteen-month rule ~

The 2005 capture carries the statute. Music and films were allowed only after eighteen months on the market, games only when they were five years old and cost under thirty euro. Television had a 48-hour wait. Microsoft products were banned at any age, which the statute stated as a matter of principle rather than of timing. By 2019 the rule had simplified to works published at least twelve months earlier.

The rule was the argument. Di Liberto told Le Iene in April 2019 that he wanted a single world archive, a pirate blockchain as he put it, and the court's summary records the site's stated aim as una sorta di armistizio, an armistice with rights holders on the way to a collective licensing deal. Nobody on the other side ever agreed to talk about it.

~ the twelve-month problem ~

The suit that ended it was about books. In 2018 the Associazione Italiana Editori and ten companies, Garzanti and Longanesi among them and the film distributor Eagle Pictures the only one outside publishing, obtained a pre-trial evidence order and had Di Liberto's home searched. A twelve-month wait means nothing to a publisher whose title is still in print. In April 2019 Fanpage ran an interview under a headline saying the founder risked four years in prison, and in July the association dissolved itself. The site outlived its own association by about six weeks.

The Milan tribunal issued an injunction on 21 October 2019, seven weeks after the site was already gone, and ruled on the merits on 8 September 2022. It found the infringement and ordered the material removed, with a penalty of 500 euro per work and 1,000 euro per day of delay. Damages were left to a separate case and costs were set at 80,000 euro. Much of the three years in between, TorrentFreak reported, went into arguing over whether one link to the archive.org dump had to come down.

~ the dump link ~

The farewell page said the closure was Di Liberto's decision, non imputabile alla nostra volontà, not attributable to the team's will, and then it did what almost no closing tracker does. It linked to the data. The forum header had carried a line in memory of Aaron Swartz since 2013, and the last version of the logo had his photograph in it. The domain now serves a cookie-gated redirect from a parking network. A community fork runs at tntfork.it under its own name, and nothing today calls itself TNTVillage.

A CSV of every release went to the Internet Archive on 30 August 2019 and an updated one on 6 May 2020. A pack of every torrent file still on the server followed. The final export holds 134,676 release rows. The first is dated 4 April 2005 and the last 09:28 on the morning the site closed.

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