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In France, Hadopi Reporting Begins, With (Only) 10,000 IP Addresses Per Day 376

mykos writes with an excerpt from TorrentFreak that says the automated enforcement of France's three-strikes law known as Hadopi is now coming into effect: "The scope of the operation is mind boggling. The copyright holders will start relatively 'slowly' with 10,000 IP-addresses a day, but within weeks this number is expected to go up to 150,000 IP-addresses per day according to official reports. The Internet providers will be tasked with identifying the alleged infringers' names, addresses, emails and phone numbers. If they fail to do so within 8 days they risk a fine of 1,500 euros per day for every unidentified IP-address. To put this into perspective, a United States judge ruled recently that the ISP Time Warner only has to give up 28 IP-addresses a month (1 per day) to copyright holders because of the immense workload the identifications would cause."
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In France, Hadopi Reporting Begins, With (Only) 10,000 IP Addresses Per Day

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  • Carte blanche (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fastest fascist ( 1086001 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:15AM (#33685540)
    So basically copyright holders in France have free reign to find out who any IP address belonged to. With such volumes of request, there's no way their validity will be questioned in any way. Likely the whole system will soon be automated.
    • Re:Carte blanche (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Pikoro ( 844299 ) <init@@@init...sh> on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:19AM (#33685562) Homepage Journal
      In order to fix this, or at least slow it down, the copyright holders should have to pay a fixed amount per IP to offset the cost of the request for the ISP. Let's see them request 150,000 IPs per day when it cost 100 Euros per IP.
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        In order to fix this, or at least slow it down, the copyright holders should have to pay a fixed amount per IP to offset the cost of the request for the ISP. Let's see them request 150,000 IPs per day when it cost 100 Euros per IP.

        That's what some of the ISP are asking for, that the government or the copyright holders compensate them for the cost of the identifications. They only got back a big fat "no way" so far. So, currently, ISP have to comply under 8 days, at their own cost, or pay a fine.

        Likely the whole system will soon be automated

        Yeah, well, no. The law is so well conceived that it does not specify under which form the ISP have to provide the copyright infringers identification details. So one of them, in a playful manner, sent the first batch of identification details

        • Re:Carte blanche (Score:4, Insightful)

          by ArsenneLupin ( 766289 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:52AM (#33685846)
          How difficult is it to find out the home addresses of politicians? And, if it's 150000 different IP addresses, does it have to be that many different postal addresses as well?
        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          So one of them, in a playful manner, sent the first batch of identification details through the mail, on some printed sheets of paper. Good luck to try automating that. :)

          They should also print them out as CAPTCHAS - to discourage automated OCR scanning. If all French ISP's did this then the workload for 150K IP's a day would land squarely back on the shoulders of the copyright holders doing blanket requests.

      • Re:Carte blanche (Score:4, Informative)

        by Krneki ( 1192201 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @08:39AM (#33686366)
        Hey hey, slow down Johnny boy.
        This is not how democracy works. The big corporations, using corrupted politicians, create new laws that will never ever benefit the working class. Now in return the working class has to pay through taxes or higher internet fees all the new expenses that comes with this new type of regulation.

        And while the ISP is working his ass of to respect the new laws, a couple more legislation comes in order to track more user activities online, after all they are already monitoring what we are doing and if we didn't give a fuck the first time, why should we care later?

        P.S: Have a nice day.
    • Re:Carte blanche (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Thanshin ( 1188877 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:22AM (#33685590)

      Well, at least they started in France.

      You may think otherwise but fucking with the general public in France is not a good idea. First cars start to combust spontaneously. Then it's buildings. Before you have time to react, people are having their head separated from the rest of their body.

      • Re:Carte blanche (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:36AM (#33685698) Journal
        I, for one, vote for Citizen Robespierre as government liaison to the RIAA.
      • Re:Carte blanche (Score:5, Insightful)

        by captainpanic ( 1173915 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:37AM (#33685710)

        Well, at least they started in France.

        You may think otherwise but fucking with the general public in France is not a good idea. First cars start to combust spontaneously. Then it's buildings. Before you have time to react, people are having their head separated from the rest of their body.

        Partially true.
        But it's the unions which are strong and actually accomplish something. The unions organize the enormous strikes to protect the rights of the workers.

        Those riots where cars get burned are no more than a national sport. They do not accomplish much (some awareness of problems at best). The real French revolution was 221 years ago.

        The future will be the most interesting. A kid downloads illegal content... and daddy the freelance software engineer gets shut down. That would be one of the first lawsuits. And I seriously doubt that it will come to riots and strikes. More likely that people will find a technical workaround.

        • Re:Carte blanche (Score:4, Insightful)

          by jedidiah ( 1196 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:53AM (#33685850) Homepage

          Ruin enough people's lives and you will have lots of the wrong sort of people mad at you.

          This is how real revolutions begin.

          • Re:Carte blanche (Score:5, Insightful)

            by captainpanic ( 1173915 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @08:28AM (#33686260)

            Innocent until proven guilty - that still stands... but governments are really trying hard to prove that we're guilty of something.

            And surprise, surprise, if you look hard enough, almost everybody is guilty of something.

            If such a large group of people are misbehaving, maybe there's something wrong with the laws, rather than with the people...

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by sckeener ( 137243 )

            Ruin enough people's lives and you will have lots of the wrong sort of people mad at you. This is how real revolutions begin.

            Depends on how slowly it happens. If it happens slowly enough the next generation just assumes this is the way it is. The drug war has ruined tons of people's lives and we have neither won the war nor declared it legal.

        • Re:Carte blanche (Score:5, Insightful)

          by mlts ( 1038732 ) * on Friday September 24, 2010 @08:51AM (#33686522)

          What happens in France with this bill will echo throughout the world. If it is successful, politicians in the US and UK will follow suit and start allowing entities who have no law enforcement duties to be able to demand millions of names daily from ISPs.

          Of course, a conviction in a criminal case or a finding of guilt in a civil case would be a rubber stamp by a judge -- Plaintiff says "ISP said this is who it is, this evidence cannot be faked" Judge drops the gavel and moves to the next case.

          Then we will find that abuses have started happening. Advertisers would have been using the mechanism to pull RL names of people who visit their websites so they can sell that information.

          We will then start to see law firms performing one lawsuit (because it is easy to try) with 50,000+ defendants (think the Hurt Locker legal wrangling.) This will become commonplace as precedent sets in showing that a name popping up on the IP list is an automatic guilt finding.

          Blowback? Anonymous VPN services will start to become a lot more popular when Joe Sixpack sees his friend Jim Riverhead get hounded by bill collectors daily for a multimillion judgement for downloading an album.

        • Re:Carte blanche (Score:5, Interesting)

          by dmayle ( 200765 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @09:30AM (#33687000) Homepage Journal

          Obviously spoken by someone who doesn't really know that much about France.

          I lived for six years in France, and there is one main difference in politics between the French and Americans. When we talk about the government, we use the pronoun 'they': they can't do this, if they raise taxes, etc. For the the French, the government is 'we'. (Cue bad French jokes). I don't know why we do it [some stupid policy]. We need to do something about retirement ages.

          It seems small, and so you might discount it, but this little difference is key to understanding the French. They are disgusted when voter turnout was an amazingly low (for them) 88% in the last election. We as Americans are happy if we get 50%. They've rewritten their constitution five times because they felt the situation had changed and it needed to be updated.

          And as to the riots just being a national sport, that's not true. In 2006, the conservative right wing government tried to introduce a special employment contract that discriminated against the young. (Values of the French republic: Liberty. Equality. Brotherhood.) The youth held strikes, and rioted. They barricaded schools, held rallys, etc. A month later the discriminatory contract was removed from law.

          As a nation, we haven't had that much national will since the civil rights movement. (Unless you count the national racism that whipped us into a fervor to support George Bush and his plans in Afghanistan^H^H^H Iraq.)

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by couchslug ( 175151 )

        One thing USians don't get that rioty French and Greeks and such DO get is that without protest, the government will go on fucking them.

        USians _used_ to get that, but 1776 was a long time ago.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Joce640k ( 829181 )

      If they've automated the process* then you can bet a lot of 'secret' requests will be made, too. Who's visiting which websites? Who's on the other end of an instant messenger? Who's reading which tweets?

      [*] Let's face it, it's not going to be clerks reading printouts...

      • by John Hasler ( 414242 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:39AM (#33685742) Homepage

        No, no, no. That could never happen in Europe. European governments have infinite respect for privacy.

        • Re:Carte blanche (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Robert Zenz ( 1680268 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:54AM (#33685874) Homepage

          Actually, most of the european governments would like to see more and stricter privacy laws (I'm not talking UK here, they're an island). The problem is in this case that the EU-Central-Government seems pretty hard influenced by lobbies of all kind. Additionally there are negotiations behind closed doors with the industry about this.

          I'm not saying that the EU is something bad, hell no, I think it's the first step into the right direction. But we really should drag industry-lobbies out of the parliament and shot them in the streets.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by John Hasler ( 414242 )

            Actually, most of the european governments would like to see more and stricter privacy laws...

            Which they themselves would, of course, scrupulously obey. No democratic government would ever spy on its own citizens. That would violate "human rights" and no politican would ever do that. Unless, of course, it is for your own good. And the government always knows what is best for you, so it's ok.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      ACTA is bringing that to the rest of the World. One Camembert to rule them all [ffii.org].

    • Re:Carte blanche (Score:4, Informative)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @08:05AM (#33686000) Journal
      "Likely the whole system will soon be automated."
      Australia is dreaming of that too. Show ID to get an ISP account, a fed or state task force clicks on any Australian ip and the data links back in real time.
      ".... the AFP [Australian Federal Police] told the briefing that it wanted to automate the process of requesting and obtaining access to telecommunications data."
      http://www.zdnet.com.au/inside-australia-s-data-retention-proposal-339303862.htm [zdnet.com.au]
      France may want the same instant system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frenchelon [wikipedia.org] in the courts :)
    • Re:Carte blanche (Score:5, Informative)

      by AwaxSlashdot ( 600672 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @08:09AM (#33686054) Homepage Journal

      So basically copyright holders in France have free reign to find out who any IP address belonged to.

      Technically, copyright holders don't know who the IP belongs to. They provide a list of IP to HADOPI, a state run service. HADOPI request the IDs and execute the 3 strikes process (e-mail, snail-mail, disconnection).

      With such volumes of request, there's no way their validity will be questioned in any way.

      Everything have been crafted that way. There are application notes from the gov discouraging the justice to run additional investigation and proceed to the disconnection solely from the "proofs" provided by copyright holders.

      Likely the whole system will soon be automated.

      Currently, there is one little glitch : the connection between ISP and HADOPI has not been formally defined. Gov does not want to draft it because the ISP will have the right to define the fees they'll ask to process this id request.

      So one ISP sent back the identification printed on paper since the format the id should be sent is not specifically defined.

      • Re:Carte blanche (Score:5, Interesting)

        by kangsterizer ( 1698322 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @08:37AM (#33686346)

        and the ISP in question is FREE.FR
        I think it's worth mentioning their name as they regularly stand out to defend such causes. The competition is mostly owned by music/media lobbies therefore they mostly do what they're told.

        It goes further. The person from the government who was first in charge of HADOPI has been forced into the biggest French ISP administration (Orange/France Telecom - a previously state owned company), to make them, sorry, force them to accept and play nice with HADOPI.

        That's how far the corruption goes. Note that this person thinks OpenOffice is a firewall solution, just as a funny bonus.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by thijsh ( 910751 )
      Yes, carte blanche indeed... they can basically brute force all French citizens IPs to trace everyone. According to this article [webinfrance.com] France has 13.5 million households with internet. When they request the details of the IPs of 150.000 of those each month it will take 7,5 years to get the details of *all* households in France. Since the article is from 2008 they probably have a higher level of households with internet now, extrapolating increase from 2008 that would be just under 10 years to let them get the det
      • Sorry for the self-reply, I made a mistake... It's 150.000 per *day*, not per month! I actually calculated it right the first time and thought: "wait, that can't be right, I probably switched days and months...". Nope, I did that by mistake after that... So sadly the real calculation is:
        150.000 IPs per day = 13,5 million households in 90 days = 3 months!!! So assuming the they have a lot more broadband connections since 2008 it would be around 4 months!

        in just 4 months the media company will already own
  • Typical (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rik Sweeney ( 471717 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:16AM (#33685548) Homepage

    To put this into perspective, a United States judge ruled recently that the ISP Time Warner only has to give up 28 IP-addresses a month (1 per day) to copyright holders because of the immense workload the identifications would cause

    So? The ISPs will have to hire more staff to cope with the demand. This is an excellent way to create new jobs and get people back to work and help the economy recover faster.

    But no, you only look at the downside :P

    • I was all about to go all candlemaker's petition [wikipedia.org] on you until I caught the emoticon at the end, lol
    • Yes, the extra workload that doesn't bring in any extra money. Good luck with that theory.

      • 2 guys that only barely got the joke, and one that completely missed it despite the emote.

        Excuse me while I go and weep for humanity..

      • You might want to check your sarcasm-detector, I think its not working right ;)

    • > The ISPs will have to hire more staff to cope with the demand.

      Wouldn't it be simpler for the government to hire people to go around vandalizing property, thereby creating work for tradesmen? That should help mollify the unions while providing employment to young men from the suburbs doing something they enjoy. Break enough windows and soon the economy will be booming (and they can blame all the damage on the Roma!)

    • It's not the ISPs who'll suffer - they can automate the process - it's the court system.

      I'd love to see 150,000 court cases brought every day, all for downloading a couple of mp3s but the sad fact is that most cases won't go much further than sending a letter or two.

      • by durrr ( 1316311 )
        They'll bake them together in batches of one million unsoved requests, and do the court run once a month
        1mil * 1500 *30 = €45 billion.

        Now if anyone here doesn't realize the law was written entirely by copyrigth interest groups then just look at that number again, no on bothers to throw around fantasy sums like that except for the US goverment or the entertainment copyright lobby.
  • by assemblerex ( 1275164 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:20AM (#33685566)
    If 10% resolve to a proxy server in Korea, then what? Someone in france running a proxy server is about to get a shitload of mail.
  • Erm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ledow ( 319597 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:20AM (#33685578) Homepage

    And are the *copyright holders* tasked with identifying the same amount of copyright material, verifying it (which would presumably involve downloading a substantial proportion of it themselves, otherwise it's just hearsay - "Yes, your honour, I saw this IP address connect to this tracker asking for this file. Even though it's called "Aliens" I can't tell you the content because it *obvious* that it must be the Hollywood film of the same name"), its original IP address, the copyright holder (i.e. if they find infringing material that isn't under *their* copyright, are they obliged to notify the authorities and/or the person whose copyright it is? Surely otherwise they are deliberately ignoring a crime? That could get interesting).

    It's one of those laws that'll be in fashion and then in a year's time the copyright holders will all be complaining that it's insufficient and not effective and too much work for them and they'll give up on it. Hopefully they *have* bitten off more than they could chew and ISP's therefore have to employ dozens of staff, double their broadband prices etc. to keep up and that'll provide a pretty clear economic oversight to those implementing that law and, most importantly, putting some of that burden on the ISP's.

    And all for a letter dropping through the door where people reply saying "It wasn't me, my son visited/dog did it/wireless was hacked/computer caught a virus/etc." and you have to go to court to try to prove it eventually anyway (cutting off your broadband for alleged but unproven infringements sounds a pretty good way to waste the courts time too, and they take much less kindly to that).

    • I'm sure the RIAA is confident that it can bury/pay off all the false accusations.

    • by umghhh ( 965931 )
      cut access means no money paid I can imagine? Could this mean that false accusations which are inevitable will cause ISPs to fight against this law due to lost business??? OTOH the way it works in Germany right now is that the whole burden of the proof is on the accused site with lawyers of the might recording industry being able to chose friendly courts all over the country thus increasing their own chances and costs for the opponents. I wonder where this ends?
    • Re:Erm (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Antity-H ( 535635 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:53AM (#33685852) Homepage

      Well unfortunately you don't get off the hook simply by saying that it wasn't you, you have to prove it wasn't you and if you do, you still get fined because you neglected the security of your network installation.

      To "help" people with securing their network, the french government issued a 200+ pages specification for a software that would secure your computer and prevent it from being used to downlaod illegal content.

      The specification requires the program to be one the best malware ever created, able to disrupt anti virus and anti spyware so it's not removed by error, hidden so the process can't be killed by the user, so the program can't be uninstalled, logs in both a crypted and an unencrypted files all network actions of the machine, etc etc

      Basically the best spyware ever. This is on the market for a contractor to realize. Oh and obviously people will have to buy it to comply with the network security requirements.

      I cant' wait for the first lawsuits.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ledow ( 319597 )

        And just about every court in the world recognises that it's extremely hard to prove a negative. That's what I'm waiting for - the court's interpretation of the first few real life cases where a denial is officially lodged. The problem is that EU law trumps French law (absolutely, completely, 100%) and EU legislation is pretty hot on things like not requiring people to prove they *DIDN'T* do things.

        Fining someone in such an environment is really tricky, because you're basically putting undue burden on the

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by AK Marc ( 707885 )
          But it was proven by someone else to be you. Your connection, which you are responsible for, accessed illegal content. That's "proof" even if just circumstantial, that you did it. They most certainly are not proceeding without proof. You may not like it. You may think it flawed, but they are most certainly not doing without any proof at all.

          It could easily be equated, in a court, to someone being fined for not locking their house, which allowed other people to walk in and use their house as a brothel
    • Re:Erm (Score:5, Insightful)

      by radish ( 98371 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @08:16AM (#33686130) Homepage

      Here's an idea. Create a whole bunch of ~700mb video files - content is unimportant as long as you filmed it yourself. Name them things like "Aliens.mp4" and "Terminator.mp4" and add a license screen at the beginning indicating that these movies are free for anyone to distribute or copy provided they do not work for and are not associated with the major film studios or any of their agents - you're the copyright holder so you can make up whatever terms you want. Now torrent all these, wait for the enforcers to download them for verification, and hadopi their asses :)

      • Re:Erm (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @08:23AM (#33686202) Homepage
        Here's an idea: do it, rather than posting on Slashdot about it.
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by amentajo ( 1199437 )

          Here's an idea: do it, rather than posting on Slashdot about it.

          radish may already plan on doing it, you don't know. Posting on Slashdot about it does not take away his/her ability to do so.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Rogerborg ( 306625 )
            If you're posting about it, you're not doing it. If you're planning to do it, you're not doing it. Talk is very, very cheap.
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by sorak ( 246725 )

          Here's an idea: do it, rather than posting on Slashdot about it.

          He's posting because I'm sure that if one guy did this, he would be laughed out of court, or he would be punished with no regard to guilt, or he would be slapped with some fine that basically amounts to "harrassment/abusing public resources/you pissed us off". If half the country did it, then it might make an interesting protest.

  • That's Everyone (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dr_Barnowl ( 709838 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:22AM (#33685584)

    I call BS on the 1-per-day thing for Time Warner - you're seriously telling me that your IP addresses are given out by computers, to routers with unique MAC addresses which you use for billing / service tier purposes, and you can't automate a process that matches a given DHCP lease to a given customer? Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

    • I think the catch is that it would be easy for Time Warner to automate checking for who has a particular IP address right now. However, depending on how frequently they change IP addresses(do they change every time the modem requests a DHCP renewal, or on some other interval?), the problem lies in figuring out who had that IP at a particular point in the past. The historical information as far as who had what IP might not even be logged. Also, with TW in particular(and probably other companies as well),
    • Maybe they actually do something reasonable like download the file themselves to make sure that the accused is actually breaking copyright. As someone pointed out just above, a torrent named "Aliens" could be anything. There's probably paperwork (and hopefully a nice fee too) to be done too to allow someone's address to be given out.

    • Re:That's Everyone (Score:5, Informative)

      by pehrs ( 690959 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:44AM (#33685778)

      Okay, I will bite.

      Kalle is 00:23:6c:8a:75:26
      Oscar is 00:21:b7:24:52:18

      Sep 22 17:04:08 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.0.74 from 00:23:6c:8a:75:26 via re0
      Sep 22 17:04:09 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPACK on 192.168.0.74 to 00:23:6c:8a:75:26 via re0
      Sep 22 22:29:37 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPRELEASE of 192.168.0.74 from 00:23:6c:8a:75:26 via re0 (found)
      Sep 22 22:29:37 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPRELEASE of 192.168.0.74 from 00:23:6c:8a:75:26 via re0 (found)
      Sep 22 22:29:37 husky dhcpd[2673]: Released lease for IP address 192.168.0.74
      Sep 22 22:30:18 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPDISCOVER from 00:21:b7:24:52:18 via re0
      Sep 22 22:30:18 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPOFFER on 192.168.0.74 to 00:21:b7:24:52:18 via re0
      Sep 22 22:30:20 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.0.74 from 00:21:b7:24:52:18 via re0
      Sep 22 22:30:20 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPACK on 192.168.0.74 to 00:21:b7:24:52:18 via re0
      Sep 22 22:34:37 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPRELEASE of 192.168.0.74 from 00:21:b7:24:52:18 via re0 (found)
      Sep 22 22:34:37 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPRELEASE of 192.168.0.74 from 00:21:b7:24:52:18 via re0 (found)
      Sep 22 22:34:37 husky dhcpd[2673]: Released lease for IP address 192.168.0.74

      Given this data, please tell me which user had 192.168.0.74 at Sep 22 22:30...

      Finding out how the switching fabric in a large network is configured at a point in time is a non-trivial problem. To this you should add that you don't know the precision of clocks involved, nor do you know if one of your users suddenly changed their MAC address. Possible you can log MAC address-port allocation, but even this is a very crude tool, as you have to match this logging information against your DHCP logs and then make sure that nobody was cheating the system by hard configuring an IP so it wasn't handed out by DHCP (remember: dumb switches are common in the last mile!)

      I don't envy anybody having to build such a system that can stand up to any scrutiny.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by wvmarle ( 1070040 )

        It will depend on your total configuration.

        My previous ISP seemed to work that way indeed: just do a DHCP request through the cable modem, and I got my IP and was connected. This was a semi-fixed IP address, for months on end I would get the same address, so should be pretty easy for them to match an IP address to an actual connection, and with that subscriber. Basically until there was some network maintenance.

        My current ISP I have to do PPPoE - that means send them un/pw combination to get an IP (but in

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by irix ( 22687 )

        DHCP option 82 will contain the MAC address of the cable modem as inserted by the CMTS. This is checked before IP address allocation is done, and is verified by the DHCP server (this is how they identify subscribers).

        The DHCP servers will be synced with NTP.

        I'm not saying it will stand up to "any scrutiny" but most cable operators are already putting this information in to a reporting database and can query who had what IP address and when with a one-line SQL statement. They may have to preserve this data l

    • It's 1 per day for copyright holders (specifically the USCG on behalf of a copyright holder). They process many more for law enforcement which eats up time and is significantly more important.

      I'm sure they were also worried about person X coming and demanding 100 immediate lookups for copyright issues, then person A, then person B coming and doing the same. It's also likely the system is not centralized and the ISP has near zero business incentive to comply.

      Since it's for a subpeona, they really need to m

  • Impressive. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Xest ( 935314 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:28AM (#33685634)

    Or in other words, by this time next year, the media cartel with have lookup tables of every single consumer IP address owner in France, because for a population of 62 million, many of whom aren't online, or share an IP, that's all it'll take at the given rate.

    Worse, because it'll be so costly for ISPs, they'll have more incentive to just assign a static IP per subscriber and create lookup tables themselves. Effectively this is the end of any amount of online privacy in France, if you connect to the net their, before long your IP and your name, phone number, home address, and e-mail address will be easily matched- what're the chances of such lookup tables staying secure and private indefinitely?

    Something is going to go seriously wrong with this system one way or another, it's either going to kill off ISPs, or it's going to suffer torential backlash and be revoked, or in perhaps the worst case, it's going to make the online population of France the biggest target of tracking, identity theft, and scams in history.

  • A trivial problem (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bjourne ( 1034822 )
    The technology already exists for the ISP to resolve an IP address to a specific customer. How else would they be able to disable your access if you stop paying your internet bills? Blaming it on the technology being to hard and to costly is just weak. Whether it is a good idea to have private companies divulge private information about their customers to other private companies without going through the judicial process or not, is a different question altogether.
    • The technology already exists for the ISP to resolve an IP address to a specific customer. How else would they be able to disable your access if you stop paying your internet bills?

      I think it's more likely they identify their customers by their phone number, and they assign an IP address after they verify that they're a current paying customer. Broadband IP addresses are often assigned via DHCP and so will be fairly random. They would have to check their DHCP logs to tell which customer was using which IP at which time.

    • by dave420 ( 699308 )
      ISPs often run massively complicated networks, sometimes from different companies they've bought over time. Knowing who was using an IP address at any given point in the last month is a very difficult thing to achieve, especially over complicated networks of different systems.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      For ADSL and similar services, cutting people off is generally* done by account name on the authentication server rather than IP address. Customers' IP addresses can change on a regular basis; their account name never does. Otherwise access is disabled by disabling the port which the customer connects to. It would be quite rare to disable access by blocking their IP.

      * For "generally" read "always"

  • Pirate Party (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:33AM (#33685672) Homepage

    THIS is why I'm voting Pirate Party next time around.

    I believe P2P is only hurting sales a few percent at most and this reaction is way out of proportion.

  • by Eivind Eklund ( 5161 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:34AM (#33685678) Journal

    There's 62277432 people in France, using the world bank 2008 estimate (See a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=population+of+france").

    We generously assume that they have one Internet connection each.

    With 150000 IP addresses warned every day, that's 50,000 people cut off every day (assuming the volume keeps up).

    At that rate, it takes 1246 days to cut off everybody, which is fairly precisely 3.5 years.

    Eivind.

  • Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)

    by airfoobar ( 1853132 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:36AM (#33685702)

    Ok, the US example isn't really putting anything into perspective. Here's a better way to do that.

    France has a population of 60 million. If 150k letters are sent every day, then we get: 60,000,000 / 150,000 = 400. The entire population of France can be canvassed with Hadopi notices in a little more than a year.

    Liberté, égalité, fraternité and all that bullshit are far behind them now.

    • Re:Perspective (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ecuador ( 740021 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:56AM (#33685912) Homepage

      Liberté, égalité, fraternité and all that bullshit are far behind them now.

      You are overreacting, it's still there...

      liberté - Copyright holders are free to get the IP's of everyone.
      égalité - Notice "everyone" from above. Soon the entire citizen base of France will be equally harassed by copyright holders.
      fraternité - Well, I am sure there will be more chance for the millions of harassed citizens to come together and share their woes in a brotherly fashion.

  • by Drakkenmensch ( 1255800 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:37AM (#33685714)

    The copyright holders will start relatively 'slowly' with 10,000 IP-addresses a day, but within weeks this number is expected to go up to 150,000 IP-addresses per day according to official reports.

    150,000 names per day for a whole year is nearly 55 million names. Will the entertainment industry just skip on the rigmarole and simply do a class-action suit against the totality of the french population?

    • by wvmarle ( 1070040 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @08:17AM (#33686140)

      No you see it wrong.

      They need three strikes to disconnect a subscriber. Say on average three people sharing a connection (a typical household size, won't be much off for France), and assume every household has an Internet connection (that's a sure over-estimation of course), that makes just over 20 mln subscribers in France.

      Now say all of them are involved in the regular illegal sharing of copyrighted material (another overestimation).

      Three strikes means some 60 mln notices.

      150k per (working) day, some 250 working days in a year, that means within two years time the complete ISP subscriber base has been warned three times and has been reported to the courts for further action.

      So by the end of 2012, the complete French economy comes to a halt. The court system is fully overloaded, an dall ISPs are filing for bankruptcy for lack of any subscribers.

      Now that would be fun.

  • Dear companies, (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nkh ( 750837 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:45AM (#33685784) Journal
    Dear SACEM [sacem.fr] and record companies selling stuff in France,

    Because of the HADOPI law and the way you treated your potential customers for the past years, because of the fact that I have to pay a "copyright" tax on every blank media I buy, and because I've been offered a guitar [gibson.com], I'm pissed off to the point I'll do something tangible in my life.

    TV has already been replaced mostly by books, tabletop games, and a few YouTube videos every other week. As for music, I'm learning the guitar, I don't need you anymore, I won't give you my money anymore, it's over, I'll make my own music and entertain my family by myself.

    Also, fuck you...
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by takev ( 214836 )
      Please don't forget to pay for the right to entertain your family with your music, it is very likely (actually mathematically certain) that you infringe on part (one beat of musical passage is enough these days) of a copyrighted song.
  • ISPs will love this (Score:3, Informative)

    by Ogive17 ( 691899 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:52AM (#33685830)
    ISPs will enjoy their sales dropping by 30% after a year due to this law and people getting their internet disconnected. Not only that, they have to provide the information that will result in the lost sales.
  • In other news (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Zoxed ( 676559 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @07:53AM (#33685848) Homepage

    In other news VPN providers in France reporting record profits :-)

  • by Anonymous Coward

    "Free" (name of a french ISP) is sending the informations via paper mail, one sheet per request, to slow down the whole process.

  • had an early lead in internet douchebaggery, but in recent times the antipodean aussies made a stunning breakthrough in online dirtbag status. but its nice that the latest reigning champions of sleazy network manipulation has come to roost with the eurotrash

  • Dear French voters (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fnj ( 64210 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @08:04AM (#33685986)

    You signed up for a filthy corrupt fascist regime. This is the shit that comes with it. Enjoy.

  • Sad (Score:4, Funny)

    by Jaysyn ( 203771 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @08:22AM (#33686192) Homepage Journal

    It's sad to think that even when a country goes thru the trouble of killing all of their nobles, they just end up making new ones eventually.

  • by Delgul ( 515042 ) <gerard@onlinespa ... l ['ter' in gap]> on Friday September 24, 2010 @08:33AM (#33686308) Homepage

    Projects like http://freenetproject.org/ [freenetproject.org] will be very very popular soon in France I guess.

    Solutions like this provide:
    - Encryption
    - Anonymity
    - Credible deniability
    - Darknets

    These kind of solutions do not work very fast at the moment because of the limited number of users. There was never really the need. Now there is and people will flock to it in big numbers. As the number of users start to rise, it will become very big, very fast.

    Two years from now they will be in exactly the same spot, except they will not even be able to track the problem anymore. A bit of ironic justice I guess...

  • by airfoobar ( 1853132 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @08:44AM (#33686424)

    I want a significant percentage of the population to lose their internet connections, I want them to be pissed off and I want to see the digital economy realise what a totally useless abomination Hadopi is. I want them all to point their fingers at that loser Sarkozy and the "entertainment" industry who pushed this through despite all the warnings, and I want them both to be thrown out of power and out of France.

    Here's to wishing..

  • by e065c8515d206cb0e190 ( 1785896 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @08:58AM (#33686616)
    This law is retarded.
    So is the tax that the french pay on CD/HDD to compensate for artists losses.
    So is a lot of filesharing/copyright "protection" enforcement.

    But let's not forget it's illegal to download a song or movie you didn't pay for.
    Yes, I know, movie studios are producing movies without scenarios, music labels are abusing artists, blah blah blah. We've heard this before.

    But is "ok let's download their stuff, that will teach'em a lesson" the appropriate response? Really? I fail to see the logic here. I'd much rather punish them as consumers usually do, by not buying their sh*t. Not by "stealing" from them (yes, that's stealing, even if bits aren't really tangible (well, they are, but you know what I mean)).


    Yes, I am aware this post will be modded down into oblivion as "music and movies, just like information, want to be free".
  • by unity100 ( 970058 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @09:58AM (#33687408) Homepage Journal
    you come up accusing someone, saying they 'stole' your property, but, you dont need to prove it. accusation is enough. the burden of proof, doesnt lie on the shoulders of the accuser as it should. it lies on the shoulders of the accused. not only that, but the accuser can come up accusing with its OWN records, with no verifiable proof that those records are genuine.

    morondom.
  • by JohnnyGTO ( 102952 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @10:15AM (#33687682) Homepage
    after six months of Hadopi law every know French IP address has dropped off the Internet. Official are confused and worried some speculating that the entire country of France may have been stolen by aliens. Others argue that they all just found something better to do, a little wine, some bread, a pretty girl...
  • Don't hurt me! (Score:4, Informative)

    by amoeba1911 ( 978485 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @02:26PM (#33690960) Homepage
    I AM A COPYRIGHT HOLDER and I AM PROUD OF IT.

    In fact, we're ALL copyright holders. Anytime you draw anything you own the copyright to it. Anytime you take a photo you own the copyright. Anytime your kid draws a crayon drawing, that's more copyrighted work... you should be proud of the fact that your kid will own the exclusive rights to that crayon drawing for 75 years after he's dead. Awesome, isn't it? Anytime you whistle yourself a tune, you own the copyright to that musical performance. If it's an original tune, then you own the copyright to the musical score. Anytime you speak, you own the copyrights to the sound you produced, as well as the words you sequenced together. Anytime you write something on slashdot, you own the copyright to it too.

    This however is at best a blatant and outrageous over-generalization, could be considered an offensive omission:

    Copyright holders are currently in the process of sending out tens of thousands of IP-addresses of alleged infringers to Internet service providers

    No, I'm not sending any IP addresses. You're not sending any IP addresses. Who are these people labeled as "copyright holders"? I know who they are, that's the "copyright mafia".

    Please, properly label these a-holes who want to protect their lavish lifestyles at the expense of us all. Saying that they are copyright holders is over generalization. All humans are copyright holders. These people the article is referring to are the COPYRIGHT MAFIA. They switched their Tommy guns for lawyers; instead of protection money they collect "distribution fees" for doing something that we could do easier without them. Instead of setting example by breaking your knee caps, they set example by suing you into oblivion. They have gotten accustomed to their lavish lifestyles at the expense of everyone around them. This is a mafia operation, not innocent "copyright holders".

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