Idk if the Americans could force the French government to cooperate and get them to seize the servers
What.cd was a music/book/software torrent site that rose from the ashes of oink's pink place. The french government indeed seized the the servers at the request of the American Government.
Yeah it was pretty fucked up, what.cd had some some of the strictest content rules of any tracker. Just to get on you had to do an interview with an admin with questions ranging from "what kind of music do you listen to?" to "What is your primary mode of transportation?" I think it only had ~300,000 users, you had to maintain a ratio so that every member contributed to the site. Some big artists like Trent Reznor were members and would actually put their own albums up because they knew what users were super vocal about spreading stuff that they like.