Study - Zone Telechargement: the replication process of a pirate site

Initialement publié le 09 October 2017 on the website : www.hadopi.fr

Study of illegal services

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In its legal role of observing the unlawful use of protected works, the supreme authority for the distribution and protection of intellectual property on internet (Hadopi) has decided to study the reappearance of a shut down pirate site.

A few months after the shutdown of zone-telechargement.com, a new site appeared under the address zone-telechargement.ws. With a look and feel very similar to the original site, it has acquired a substantial audience, making it one of the most massively visited unlawful sites in France.

A survey of all publicly available data on each page was therefore carried out in June 2017. This data was then statistically processed.

It appears that the term "mirror" site does not really apply to the new site: it is rather a re-creation ex nihilo, and not a simple reactivation of the original site with a new domain name.

This replica ensures a double source of advertising revenue. The site itself presents advertisements on its pages from partners who themselves appear to be fraudulent. In addition, Zone Telechargement requires users to make a detour via a dedicated website on which - unbeknownst to them - advertising banners for well-known advertisers appear.

The speed with which this replica went online enabled it to exploit its predecessor's awareness and rapidly attract a large audience.

Last but not least, this new, massively infringing website is fed by a small number of contributors. Less than thirty of these accounts are said to be responsible for all the content posted. 90% of the 22,000 titles available have been made available by fourteen accounts.

So, far from the idea of universal, disinterested sharing that this new site claims to defend, its profit-making objective is obvious, and we can see that its content supply relies on a small number of contributors.

Following on from the actions taken by rights holders to obtain the shutdown of sites such as Zone Telechargement, precise and continuous observation of the ways in which these supplies seek to reconstitute themselves will contribute to a more effective long-term fight against piracy.

By notifying technical and financial intermediaries of these illegal replicas and their specific financing mechanisms as quickly as possible, we hope to make it more difficult to renew massively counterfeit supplies.