The Nancy court sentenced the administrator of the “1fichier.com” download site to a one-year suspended prison sentence and 20,000 euros in fines.

He appeared before this criminal court of the Specialized Interregional Jurisdiction (Jirs) for "counterfeiting of intellectual works and counterfeiting of phonograms and videograms", we learned from a judicial source.

The court also imposed a fine of 100,000 euros on the company DStorage, manager of the site, the same source said.

In addition, the judges demanded that the site remove all the files designated in their judgment and that it disseminate a statement for a month outlining the conviction on the site's home page.

This decision is subject to appeal by both parties.

6 million downloads

The big actors of the cinema, French and world, Pathé, Gaumont, UGC, Warner Bros, Paramount, Columbia Pictures, Universal or Disney had underlined at the hearing, on January 22, the losses which this type of site generates for them.

"If we do not obtain a conviction, it is the door open to all downloads," said a source familiar with the matter.

In total, the complaints concerned 1,737 files that were the subject, between January 20, 2016 and August 31, 2017, of a total of some 6 million downloads.

Illegal downloads of copyrighted works

The National Federation of Film Publishers (FNEF), the Society of Authors, Composers and Music Publishers (Sacem) and the Civil Society of Phonographic Producers (SCPP) were the first three to file a complaint.

All were aimed at DStorage, headquartered in La Chapelle-aux-Bois, a peaceful village in the Vosges, although the shareholder resides in the Paris region.

The three plaintiffs criticized 1fichier.com, a very popular site in 2016 with 270,000 visits per day for 31 million pages viewed monthly, for authorizing downloads of protected works and offering them to the public in a tort, because without the authorization of the beneficiaries.

The site also refused to delete works when asked to do so.

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