Greek man sentenced to prison for running a private torrent site 10 years ago

In brief: A private BitTorrent community that has been offline for more than 10 years recently led in an unprecedented sentence for a Greek man. Local authorities appear to be sending a clear message: illegal file-sharing activities will now be treated as a serious criminal offense.

A 59-year-old living in the Greek city of Piraeus was recently sentenced by a local court to five years in prison, a €10,000 fine, and an additional €1,800 in legal costs. According to reports, the man was involved with a popular Greek BitTorrent site more than a decade ago. The website is long defunct and does not appear to have provided him with significant financial gain.

The site in question, P2Planet.net, launched in 2011 and shut down in 2014. Despite struggles with hosting costs and repeated DDoS attacks targeting Greek P2P sites, the community managed to attract over 44,000 registered members. The site’s torrent tracker hosted 14,000 torrents, mostly offering films, TV series, music, and software.

According to the ruling, P2Planet was eventually shut down by local law enforcement. Authorities raided the home of the person they identified as the private tracker’s administrator, arrested him, and seized a hard drive for forensic investigation. Members of the community primarily used Azureus/Vuze, a BitTorrent client that was once popular but has been abandoned for about seven years.

More than 10 years after the case was first opened, the Court of Appeals in Piraeus handed down a harsh and unprecedented sentence. According to sources, it is the first time in Greece that someone has been sent directly to prison for facilitating the unlawful sharing of copyrighted content through the BitTorrent network.

Observers were reportedly stunned when the judge ordered the man to be handcuffed and taken to prison immediately.

The sudden arrest follows a similar case in the city of Larissa, as authorities appear determined to signal that unlawful content sharing will now be treated as a serious criminal offense.

In reality, file sharing represents only a small fraction of online piracy and copyright infringement today. Streaming has become a far more widespread phenomenon, though peer-to-peer networks are still targeted as major offenses in some European countries and beyond.

As TorrentFreak reported, a comparable five-year prison sentence was handed down a few years ago to the operator of greekstars.net and greekstars.co. In that case, the defendant initially received a suspended sentence but was later arrested and imprisoned after attempting to relaunch the offending domains.