T411: How much did illegal downloading really cost?

Following the closure of the T411 site, Alpa and SACEM unveil their first estimates of the shortfall caused by the download platform. Find out how much illegal downloading actually costs companies that legally market cultural content.

A few days ago, the court closed definitively the download site T411 . This closure, accompanied by several arrests, follows a complaint filed by SACEM (Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music).

Indeed, every time an MP3 file or a music album is downloaded illegally, SACEM loses money. According to his own estimates, T411 would have cost him a total of 3 million euros . For its part, the Alpa (Association of Fight against Audiovisual Piracy) estimates the damage to more than one billion euros.

T411: estimated damage of 3 million euros by SACEM, 1 billion euros by Alpa
These estimates have just been communicated by the two organizations, which are still calculating the total number of files downloaded illegally. For now, the two companies agree on a total of about 250 million illegal downloads . The Alpa says it has listed 77,000 torrents of movies on the site, and 100,000 links for series. However, there is no guarantee that people who downloaded all of this content would have agreed to pay for it. That is the complexity of this case.

Remember that T411 hosted about 700 000 links of torrents of any kind. There were movies, series, video games, computer software, books and comics. Thanks to the advertisements embedded in the site, the administrators would have earned several millions of euros over the years.

David El-Sayegh, the managing director of SACEM, estimates that the directors of the site have gained 6 million since the creation of T411 in 2009. Very angry, the latter recently announced in an interview granted to the newspaper Le Monde that the " Arrest of users of the T411 site was also conceivable .