Zone Téléchargement

» see zone-telechargement.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Zone Téléchargement was an index of links. The films and albums themselves sat on cyberlockers run by other companies, which is the arrangement the French call téléchargement direct. You picked a release and clicked through a link protector, and the file came down from somebody else's server as fast as your line allowed. There was no torrent client to install and no ratio to maintain.

The domain had an earlier life. From December 2004 to December 2009 zone-telechargement.com was rented by a British company offering legal freeware downloads. It was registered again in March 2010, this time in Nassau in the Bahamas, and later that year it carried the site that made the name notorious. TorrentFreak has given the founding year as 2011 in one article and 2012 in another. French Wikipedia says 2010, and the registration record agrees with it.

Growth was slow until the summer of 2011 and steep from 2013. The French press only noticed in 2014. By May 2015 Le Figaro was reporting 3.5 million unique visitors a month for this one site, out of 10 million French people using the fifteen biggest piracy sites. On 28 November 2016 it was the 11th most visited website in France, of any kind.

That was the day it ended. The Gendarmerie nationale, working with police in Andorra, seized servers and arrested seven people in an action named Operation Gervais. SACEM, which collects for French songwriters, and the film industry's anti-piracy body ALPA had filed the complaint in 2014. Investigators put the damage to rights holders at 75 million euros and the site's income at no less than 1.5 million a year, all of it from advertising.

~ the case file ~

~ dl-protect ~

Every link on the site passed through a second site called DL-Protect, which hid the real cyberlocker address so that automated takedown requests could not find it. DL-Protect was the 19th most visited site in France in its own right, and investigators said the same people ran both. When it broke for a day in March 2016, Zone Téléchargement stopped working for hours even though every page still loaded.

The same dependency decided the ending. The main site came back online the day after the raid, but DL-Protect did not, so every link on it led nowhere. Nothing official has answered at that address since.

~ one address ~

Turkish forums of the same years did this job with a thread: a poster image and a block of RapidShare links, scattered over a hundred boards with no single front door. France concentrated the whole habit into one address with a search box, and about two million links sat behind it when the gendarmes arrived.

~ two friends from toulouse ~

The founders were Thibault Ferreira and Wilfrid Duval, friends from high school in Toulouse, both 24 when they were arrested. They had moved to Andorra by then and were picked up on international warrants. French authorities seized 450,000 euros and two luxury cars, and Andorra froze another 250,000 euros. The advertising money had traveled through offshore accounts from Malta to Belize.

The case took more than six years to reach a courtroom. On 13 March 2023 the Toulouse criminal court gave each of them 18 months in prison with 12 suspended, plus a fine of 50,000 euros. Time already served in 2017 meant neither went back inside. Their lawyer argued that the court had convicted a link while the database of files belonged to somebody else, and said they would appeal.

~ the copies ~

Two weeks after the raid a site with the same name and layout opened at zone-telechargement.ws, and nobody could say whether the original team had anything to do with it. Film industry groups and the CNC were asking for it to be closed by December 2017. A legal lookalike had launched that August, with some of its film posters hosted by the CNC itself.

The name kept moving across new domains for years. The last big one, run from Tunisia according to the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, drew about 11 million visits a month before it closed in late April 2022 with a note promising to destroy the database. "Not everything is eternal," it said.

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