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Uptobox Bid to Resurrect File-Storage Service Fails in French Court
File-hosting service Uptobox was taken offline last year following complaints from entertainment industry giants including Amazon, Disney, and StudioCanal. The platform's servers were targeted in a police raid just months after a French court ordered ISPs to block the site. Uptobox tried to reverse this decision, arguing that it's not the piracy haven rightsholders make it out to be, but the court denied that challenge.
At the height of the cyberlocker boom in the early 2010s, Uptobox was already an established name.
The platform remained online despite a fierce anti-piracy crackdown that led to the demise of Megaupload, Hotfile, and many other file-hosting services.
Uptobox faced some trouble with payment providers but still managed to grow in the decade that followed. Like many other sites of this kind, it was frequently abused by pirates to share copyrighted content. To address this, Uptobox had a takedown policy to swiftly remove those files in response to rightsholders’ reports.
Uptobox Blocked and Raided
Takedowns couldn’t prevent the site from being targeted in a site blocking order in France, where roughly a third of the site’s 30 million monthly visits originated. The site didn’t agree with this decision and, as a countermeasure, informed users how the DNS blockades could be circumvented.
For the less technically inclined, Uptobox vowed to contest the site blocking measures in court. However, before it could do so, rightsholders including Columbia, Paramount, StudioCanal, Warner Bros, Disney, Apple, and Amazon, showed that they were a step ahead.
In September 2023, French cloud hosting providers Scaleway and OpCore pulled the plug on Uptobox’s servers. Initially, it wasn’t clear who was behind the action, but it later transpired that the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) was a driving force behind it.
The server shutdowns were backed by a court order and ACE pointed a finger at two French nationals, who operated the platform from the Dubai-based company ‘Genius Servers Tech FZE’.
Uptobox Challenges Blocking Order
While Uptobox initially remained quiet, it didn’t plan to throw in the towel so easily. The company was very critical of the shutdown, not least since it was partly based on the EU’s ‘Piracy Watch List,’ which relies heavily on input from rightsholders and is not a legal determination.
In recent months, Uptobox pushed back by challenging the blocking action in a Paris court. While Genius Servers hoped to turn the case around, Marc Rees at l’Informé reports that this initial attempt failed. Last Friday, the Paris judicial court denied Uptobox’s request to lift the blocking measures.
In its defense, Uptobox explained that it had a proper takedown policy, under which 98.9% of the links reported by movie industry groups were promptly removed.
Genius Servers further argued that 70% of the files on its site were never downloaded, and that another 15% were downloaded less than 10 times. The company also stressed that Uptobox had never encouraged its users to store pirated content on its platform.
The court wasn’t convinced by these arguments, in part because they were based on information that was gathered after the fact. The company didn’t share the underlying database for review either.
Rightsholders Paint a Pirate Picture
Instead, the court went along with evidence presented by rightsholders, including a report compiled by a representative from the Association for the Fight against Audiovisual Piracy (ALPA).
The report revealed that ALPA uploaded a copyright infringing file last year to test the takedown policy. While the uploaded content could indeed be removed, the representative was able to re-upload the same content later, without any countermeasures.
ALPA further found that in a random sample of 25,504 active French-language links that were available in February 2023, the majority (84%) “referred to infringing works”. The millions of Uptobox.com takedown notices that were processed by Google further corroborates the ‘infringing’ nature, the court heard.
The same also applies to Uptobox sister site Upstream, which was blocked by the same court order due to its association with pirated content.
Takedowns are not Enough
The rightsholders arguments were sufficient for the Paris court to keep the existing blocking measures in place.
“It is clear from all these elements that the Uptobox service was used predominantly to illegally make content available to the public, violating copyright and related rights, and that the operator knew or should have known this,” the court concluded.
An important aspect of the judgment is that simply processing takedown notices was deemed insufficient. Uptobox did remove pirated files but, according to the court, it had an obligation to do more. For example, by sanctioning repeat infringers, or by making sure the pirated content couldn’t be re-uploaded so easily.
Specifically, the court writes that Uptobox “does not take any proactive measures to prevent counterfeiting on its platform, such as combating the re-uploading of deleted files, matching files, or providing contact tools for rightsholders”.
According to the court’s reading of EU law and jurisprudence, including the CJEU’s Cyando/YouTube ruling, these additional measures are required.
Finally, the court found that Uptobox’s freedom to conduct a business, which is a fundamental EU right, was not violated as Uptobox is seen as a predominantly infringing service. The copyrights of users, who may have shared private files on the platform, does not get in the way of the blocking order either, the court ruled.
