Two years after having filed a complaint, Sacem has obtained the closure of the site Download Area, Monday. Interview with David El Sayegh, secretary general of the Sacem.
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David El Sayegh, secretary-general of the Society of authors, composers and publishers of music (Sacem) says the World his satisfaction.
The closing Zone Download intervened a period of ten days after one of What.cd, an important site for downloading music. There is a hardening of the repression ?
The news is happy, it’s firm with a vengeance ! But we can’t talk about curing. It is the result of a long process of painstaking work, it is not that suddenly the Sacem and the force to awaken.
But that site is even bigger than What.cd, which was essentially devoted to the music. Here, it is broader : music, movies, video games… It was the tenth most visited website in France with over 2 million direct download links.
When the investigation has been launched ?
We have filed a complaint in 2014, joined by ALPA [Association for the fight against piracy of audiovisual]. It took a long time to proceed to the identification of accounts, assets, servers, advertisers… It is still a rather complex system, and sophisticated, this are large surveys.
We are talking about a prejudice of more than 75 million euros to rights holders. There were a lot of advertisements on the site, often pornographic in nature. It generates at least € 1.5 million of turnover per year, with offshore accounts located in Malta, Cyprus and Belize.
The two administrators, challenged by international mandates, had left France to settle in Andorra. Large seizures of assets were carried out : luxury cars, real estate, and savings accounts ; servers were seized in Germany and in Iceland.
It is in a case of infringement for profit, to high-scale. These people do not pay taxes, do not pay the right holders, they respect nothing. They develop a mechanism sophisticated to put themselves outside the law, voluntary, and highly organized.
The reaction of internet users has been very critical of the closure of this site. That their you answer them ?
I tell them that it is forbidden to hack into, and that the mission of the Sacem is to protect the copyright. The law is with us. These are activities of the counterfeiting business, these are people who became rich on the backs of the creators. They make millions without paying a euro to the creation. These are thugs who should not have the compassion of a person, and who will have to answer for their acts before the justice.
If you want to as the legal supply grows, it is necessary to regulate the market. This can’t be a wild west of digital where everyone does what he wants. Those who think it is wrong, it is a rearguard action.
The criticism from some internet users are ineligible. I want to say to them : how do the creators are not compensated when their works are used ? One is user, but it is also a citizen. The Internet is not a zone of non-law, there are rules.
do you Want to see prosecuted people who have downloaded the content to Download Area ?
The issue is mainly to stop those who are doing trade of works. Detain infringing files, it is fencing stolen goods. But the primary objective is to attack the evil at its source, and the administrators of the hacker sites.
do you Have other targets in the line of fire ?
Always, yes. Just walk on Internet to see that there are other sites. We will continue, it’s been over twenty years that we are fighting the piracy. And each time that the gendarmerie or the police intervene, it is a reminder that there is no impunity anymore for the pirates.
Some close their sites spontaneously, as the Blue Tiger, after the closure of What.cd. If you have the feeling that you are going to be able to be taken, that you quiet. To Download Area, the investigation continues. We have seen convictions very severe, for example on OMG Torrent recently. [His administrator was sentenced in September to one year in prison, of which eight months farm and 5 million euros in damages and interest.]
Read also : Download Area : seven questions to understand its closing… and reopening
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