Another anti-piracy supporter caught off-guard by YouHaveDownloaded

Dec 15, 2011 16:02 GMT  ·  By

Nicholas Sarkozy, the president of France and one of the most powerful men of Europe, was busted today after journalists from a French news site, armed with Élysée Palace IPs, took a peak to see what has been downloaded from the president’s residence.

If the three-strike piracy law adopted by French authorities early this year would be applied, the Palace would be left without an Internet connection for about two months.

A total of six downloads that can be considered copyright infringement were recorded by the new BitTorrent-use tracking service as coming from Sarkozy’s place, reports TorrentFreak.

Tower Heist, Arthur Christmas and a high quality version of a Beach Boys album were among the pirated materials.

Now, even though the YouHaveDownloaded website’s owners said that their service cannot handle Dynamic IP’s, making the pirate-appointing business less accurate, a quick look at the IP addresses provided by Nicolas Perrier of Nikopik using the Whois service from DomainTools reveals that indeed the addresses belong to “Presidence de la Republique”.

Since the controversial website was launched, a lot of organizations that support anti-piracy movements were caught with their pants down. Yesterday we say how even Sony, Universal and Fox employees spend a lot of time downloading content from torrent sites.

Interestingly, the website that hosted the original French article about the Élysée Palace illegally downloading is currently shut down, displaying a message that claims the account was suspended. Basically, it’s the exact same image I saw yesterday while I was documenting a hacking operation.

So does this mean that Sarkozy is pulling a Putin on everyone and taking down websites that stain his reputation or is this just an unfortunate incident? I began investigating the matter, so stay tuned to find out more.

Update. As it turns out, the French site ran out of bandwith due to all the attention they received as a result of this article.