Did French President Sarkozy download pirated movies, music?

Someone in the home of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, a strong proponent of anti-piracy legislation, has been using BitTorrent to download pirated versions of music and movies, according to a French blog.

An associate of the Nikopik Web site found IP addresses allocated to the Elysee Palace, Sarkozy's residence, on YouHaveDownloaded.com, a Russian-based site that tracks public downloads from BitTorrent.

It appears that copies of movies including "The Tower Heist," "Change-Up," and "Arthur Christmas," as well as the "The Beach Boys Greatest Hits" album were among six downloads linked to the palace IP addresses. Under French law, offenders get two warnings and on the third strike they can be fined and temporarily suspended from using the Internet.

The TorrentFreak blog used YouHaveDownloaded.com earlier this week to discover that IP addresses within Sony Pictures, NBC Universal, and Fox were listed as having downloaded pirated material from BitTorrent.

While an IP address can be allocated to a computer at a certain address, it can't necessarily be used to pinpoint a particular person because multiple people can share one IP address.

"But while the reports from YouHaveDownloaded (YHD) certainly have discussion value, it is worth noting that their data collection methods are just as untested as those employed by many private anti-piracy companies and their notoriously secretive 'proprietary software,'" TorrentFreak wrote today. "The difference is, however, YHD aren't using their data for the filing of lawsuits and getting people cut off from the Internet."