This is the first criminal conviction for a network of audiovisual pirates in France which leaves a taste for unfinished business. Operators of illegal sports streaming sites, five men were punished on Monday by the Rennes Criminal Court. The group's brains received a 12-month prison sentence, including six months suspended, for "chief of unauthorized reproduction or distribution of a program or videogram, and money laundering".
"The law was applied thanks to the remarkable technical knowledge of the gendarmerie", satisfies Me Etienne Drouard, associate lawyer at Hogan Lovells and specialist in IT law. "But there is still a disproportion between the low cost of this white-collar crime operation and the high cost of the investigation. "
An almost industrial hacking
From 2014 until the dismantling of this network, its members diverted their own subscriptions to Canal Plus, beIN Sports or RMC Sports. The video streams then landed on around thirty “free” sites that are well referenced by search engines like Beinsport-streaming.
A profitable activity which would have brought them at least 230,000 euros thanks to advertisements whose income went through bank accounts in tax havens.
"It was between 2014 and 2018 the largest illegal streaming sites in France with a cumulative audience of seven million monthly visitors," recalls Frédéric Delacroix, general delegate of Alpa, the Association for the fight against audiovisual piracy, among the civil parties.
Also on the plaintiffs' bench, the company Canal Plus is claiming 29.9 million euros in damages. The companies SFR and beIN Sports also brought civil actions. The court will award compensation in mid-October.
It is a symbolic victory for them but with a limited scope in fact.
Sanction procedures under study
Because like with hydras, other heads grow back when justice cuts one. "It is a dissuasive signal but the vacuum left was quickly filled by other organized delinquents, sighs Frédéric Delacroix. "They operate the ten or so sites that share a market of two million monthly visitors with real economic challenges," he assures.
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“There is a real problem of temporality in court decisions because they come too late. They lower the audiences of these illegal sites a little, but the current procedure is not sufficient to attack them at the source, ”says Pauline Blassel, general secretary of Hadopi, in charge of combating piracy.
Hadopi therefore advocates faster action that would allow a judge to ask a public authority to urgently contact search engines and Internet service providers (ISPs).
Fight against foreign websites
Objective: dereference and block illegal sites while ensuring that the measure also applies to different copies or mirror sites.
This would also block the consultation in France of sites hosted abroad which so far pass between the nets of investigators.
A “black-list” solution carried by the audiovisual reform project whose examination was to start at the end of March. Article 23 provides for a “specific referral device to fight against sports piracy”.
This new legal arsenal will be triggered by the Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority (Arcom), a merger of the CSA and Hadopi scheduled for… January 2021 at the earliest.