The French Supreme Court has ruled that the bank Société Générale was within its rights to cut off file-storage platform 1fichier.com on copyright grounds, which is good news for those copyright owners who adopt the ‘follow the money’ approach when fighting online piracy.
It brings to an end a ten year legal battle that began when Société Générale stopped providing payment processing services to 1fichier.com on the basis it hadn’t done enough to deal with copyright infringement on its platform.
According to Torrentfreak, the Supreme Court concurred with an earlier appeals court ruling that relevant “findings and statements” indicated that 1fichier.com - and its parent company Dstorage - “had failed to comply with its contractual undertaking not to publish or store any illicit content”, and on that basis “Société Générale had rightly terminated the contract”.
Although this ruling brings to an end the long-running legal battle in France, Dstorage reckons its case raises important issues under European Union law and could as yet take the matter to the EU courts.
Many copyright industries, including the music industry, have pursued a ‘follow the money’ approach as part of their anti-piracy work, pressuring payment processing providers to not offer services to platforms accused of facilitating rampant copyright infringement.
As a result, banks and other payment services will often include provisions in their terms and conditions prohibiting clients from involving themselves in copyright infringement.
Société Générale enforced such a term when it cut off 1fichier.com in 2015. That followed a complaint from Indian media company Zee Entertainment, which said that hundreds of links to copyright infringing content were being shared on the file-storage platform.
1fichier.com said it removed the files identified by Zee, and had put in place extra anti-piracy measures, but couldn’t stop the same content from being subsequently re-shared on its platform. However, it felt it had done enough to fulfill its legal obligations under EU law, and therefore the copyright term in its agreement with Société Générale had not been breached.
But the French courts clearly do not agree. We await to see if the matter now proceeds to a EU level. Given this dispute has already been rumbling on for ten years, whatever the outcome of any EU proceedings, this case demonstrates once again that clarifying and confirming the copyright obligations of tech companies can take a very long time indeed.