Greek man gets 5 years in prison for running a now-defunct torrenting site 10 years ago — Greece goes tough on torrenting

A Greek man recently received a hefty prison sentence and fine for running a long-defunct torrenting site. The 59-year-old ran a website, P2Planet, that contained over 14,000 torrent file links from 2011 to 2014, and was thus sentenced to five years in prison and a €10,000 fine, plus €1,800 in court fines.

The Single-Member Criminal Court of Appeal of Piraeus found that the 59-year-old was liable for involvement in the site, denying the appeal of his charges originally handed down years prior. The appeals court then handcuffed the man and carted him immediately to serve his prison sentence, deciding that his appeals process should not have a suspensive effect, drawing loud gasps from the courtroom.

The Piraeus man was first arrested in 2014 for his links to the torrenting website p2planet.net. The Cyber Crime Unit of the Greek police raided the man's home and, upon proving he held administrator access to the site, arrested him and confiscated a hard drive. According to reports from the appeals process, the site had 44,342 registered users, all accessing and sharing the site's 14,000 torrent files.

According to TorrentFreak, at some point near the height of p2planet's popularity in 2014, the site was targeted heavily by DDoS attacks. Eventually, the site was hacked, and its database was posted online, likely providing the police with the information needed to make the arrest.

It is unclear whether the man was serving time in captivity for the duration of his appeals process from 2014 to the present. What is clear is the Greek government's new tough-on-crime approach to handling torrenting and other online piracy-related charges. Another similar five-year torrenting conviction was recently handed down in the Greek city of Larissa, setting a precedent for torrenting crime in the future.

The peer-to-peer sharing nature of torrenting pirated files makes it extremely prosecutable. Torrenting works by providing a link to a file that is downloaded across multiple other end users' computers, then downloading the file from those constantly uploading seeds. The act of "seeding" files is prosecutable as distributing illegal materials, which was a major basis for the legal proceedings of the Greek court.

Interestingly, the act of only downloading but never seeding pirated files was the crux of Meta's legal defense after it torrented an 82 TB dataset of copyrighted material from online shadow libraries to train its LLMs. While the Greek government seeks to send a message to its constituents that piracy is a major crime that will be strictly punished, even to older men who have not distributed torrents in over a decade, this message seems to be slightly weakened in the face of major data theft by corporations.

Maybe if the man behind p2planet was connected to a multi-billion-dollar corporation, he could've gotten away with his torrenting. Alas, as a single man who didn't torrent in order to make billions of dollars, it's off to the slammer with him, the filthy rogue.

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