Authorities Reiterate Threats to Target SnowTigers Donators, Users

Last week, French authorities used military intelligence to shut down SnowTigers. This week, French authorities said that their investigation found users donating to the website. They did, however, concede that they have to wait for a court decision on the matter before proceeding.

A report from 01net highlights (Google Translation) the latest developments on the now fallen website.

The report says that 10 administrators have been arrested and now authorities are targeting users. They appear to be breaking the users down into two separate categories: users who donated to the website and users who used the site regularly.

In another report from 20minutes, authorities suggested that they have seized data from servers not only in France, butalso from the Netherlands and Canada (Google translation). An unconfirmed report flatly denied that servers had been seized in Canada.

During a 2005 court case in Canada, the copyright industry through the CRIA lost their one and only case against alleged file-sharers. Effectively, they couldn’t prove their case enough to bi-pass privacy laws and concerns to obtain private customer information from the ISP. So while authorities may say that people will be prosecuted for being a member of the site, the likelihood that anyone in Canada would be prosecuted, from what has been seen in the past, is pretty much nil. At worst, some users may get a notice of copyright infringement from their ISP via the voluntary notice-and-notice regime.

There’s been numerous reports that contain quotes from authorities suggesting that this was a profit making business. Some of those quotes suggest that if you pay money, you’d have direct access to more infringing content. One user who spoke to 20minutes said that these were plainly false and that while donators could get VIP status, you don’t get access to more content on SnowTigers. You were not encouraged to donate said the user.

If anything can be said about the case, it’s whether or not much of what is being said by authorities amounts to little more than sabre rattling. What are merely scare tactics and what are actual threats? In the past, most of the threats authorities have given, outside of the web admins, have been little more than scare tactics. Still, this is France which is run by a president who is desperate to get a three strikes law passed no matter who says the law is illegal or unconstitutional. Who knows what will happen in the end?

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