YggTorrent, one of the most visited and largest torrenting websites in France, has gone private, which means it is no longer available as a public site, according to a report by TorrentFreak.
The move comes in response to the new blocking measures implemented in France.
Further, the site is now available only to registered users. Those users who are not registered with the site are now greeted with a login screen (which normally pops up for registered users) instead of the standard torrent site homepage.
Currently, YggTorrent registrations are closed.
For those unaware, YggTorrent (sometimes abbreviated as Ygg) was founded in July 2017, following the closure of T411 on June 26, 2017.
It allows visitors to search, download, and contribute by adding torrent files, thus enabling file sharing among users of the BitTorrent protocol.
The file-sharing site, which receives more than a million visitors per month, was ranked as the 35th most visited website in France, according to Alexa statistics in 2020.
It’s also the largest French-language sharing platform that operates its own torrent tracker, which is quite a rarity these days.
As a file-sharing site with copyrighted material, YggTorrent found itself in legal problems due to which several domain names of the site were blocked by French Internet providers in response to a court order.
The aggressive blocking action in France is the primary reason YggTorrent is making its site private, the company told TorrentFreak.
By doing this, in addition to a responsive takedown policy based on legitimate claims, it is looking to reduce some of the pressure it is facing from anti-piracy bodies and appease rightsholders.
“We decided to make the site private for the moment and to have a DMCA department that is more responsive than before,” YggTorrent says.
The site’s operators believe that the aggressive blocking actions, including administrative blocking orders, taken in France by the anti-piracy bodies will not significantly increase the revenues of copyright holders.
YggTorrent says that the main reason people visit a public site to download content is that they cannot afford it. By blocking a website, anti-piracy bodies cannot expect people to pay for it, it adds.
“We do not understand the madness behind these blockades. Access to culture has a price, if people don’t download it, they simply won’t watch most of it,” YggTorrent notes.
Arcom, a French anti-piracy agency, carried out a survey earlier this month, which indicated that several people are already aware of circumvention tools such as DNS modification and VPNs (Virtual Private Networks), and awareness is expected to grow if blocking actions continue, YggTorrent adds.
“If they continue to abuse their power of blocking, people will put in place solutions to overcome the blockades, and these solutions will become mainstream over time, a bit like decentralized finance which is gaining more and more ground. As we say in French ‘action, reaction’,” YggTorrent concludes.
