Internet Pirates In France To Lose Broadband

slyjackhammer writes "France is purporting to take a hard line on copyrighted media (movies and music). According to timesonline.co.uk, a new measure approved yesterday by the French Cabinet would kill the Internet connection to those caught downloading illegally. 'There is no reason that the internet should be a lawless zone," President Sarkozy told his Cabinet yesterday as it endorsed the "three-strikes-and-you're-out" scheme that from next January will hit illegal downloaders where it hurts. Under a cross-industry agreement, internet service providers (ISPs) must cut off access for up to a year for third-time offenders.' Google and video site Dailymotion have refused to sign up as consenting participants, and the state data protection agency, consumer and civil liberties groups and the European Parliament are all kicking against the goad as well. France may be pioneer in this kind of legislation, but they sure have their work cut out for them."

Democracy

France may be pioneer in this kind of legislation

At least they're debating it in parliament. In the UK Virgin Media's behind-closed-doors deal [slashdot.org] with the media industry has already been covered here.

Note to self - I need to switch away from an ISP that is itself a content provider with vested interests in censoring my internet connection. Soon.

Re:Democracy

While I understand your point. Democracy does not inherently mean that the best result will be the outcome. What percentage of parliament is ever near objective, and full aware of the what is as stake on both sides?

Re:Democracy; and the easy solution

Download movies at work. Report your worksite. Rinse and repeat three times.

Do it on a country wide scale (say every /. reader in France) and bingo, law will either be thrown out or the economy will collapse.

Re:Democracy; and the easy solution

do it once and be fired for breaching the IT usage policy that you signed while joining the company.

beside, it's not as if a governemental agency is blocking uniterally your internet access.

I suppose that in that case, your company is considered as an ISP.

Re:Democracy; and the easy solution

Do it on a country wide scale (say every /. reader in France) and bingo, law will either be thrown out or the economy will collapse.

Or rather it will just be selectively enforced and used to persecute people the authorities don't like, similar to what's happened with so many other laws.

Re:Democracy

In other news , French telco's are going broke , as apparently , most of their high bandwidth users where pirates .

what about my wife and children?

So if I do a crime, my wife and children must be punished too?

Isn't that like in the Middle Ages?

Re:what about my wife and children?

What about the public...What happens when public access points become the route of choice for these downloaders? I can see it now when the library has no broadband.. Or the local coffee shop? Or the next door neighbor who had little knowledge about secureing his wireless router...

Re:what about my wife and children?

why not just register a new internet account with your wife's name, then with your kids name.... by then the year suspension should be over on your first account, rinse and repeat

Re:what about my wife and children?

Actually, in that time period, you'd be considered an actor for copying a play, or a musician for copying a song.

Yeah, okay

Also, you know the reason someone like Google won't sign up to be willing participants is because it's signing away their common carrier status. That will have HUGE legal repercussions in the United States. They will be suddenly responsible for even the most minor violation and susceptible to law suit. No company in their right mind would do that. It's not going to be out of the kindness of their hearts. If they could help nail people who are violating copyright without carrying any legal responsibility at all, I'm sure they would.

I'm not seeing a problem with this. You don't have a right to "share" material that is copyrighted by someone other than you if they didn't give you consent. You may not like this, you can come up with all the (possibly valid) reasons things should not be that way. It's not for YOU to decide. The only real problem is how something like this is enforced. I'm willing to bet it will be done with a false positive rate that won't go over well with the French people, who from this side of the pond seem the kind of people who don't put up with their government doing stupid things (I seriously commend them for their idea of how to go on strike).

Re:Yeah, okay

Repeat after me: ISPs are not common carriers. They have already bought other laws so the don't have to.

New malware opportunity (wonderful)

Make malware share files illegally. Sit back and watch as it causes mass shutdowns of internet connections.

Better still, tie it in to the mechanism used in the current rounds of SQL injection attacks.

Idiots. All they'll end up with is a DDOS attack on their legal system...

Andy

three strikes politician out

The punishment doesn't fit the "crime". To the "knowledge worker" Europe wants to base it's future on, losing broadband is the digital equivalent of house arrest. Without access to radio, television, books and newspapers.

I like the three strike approach though. Should be applied to politicians. Sell out your voters to special interest groups three times and your out. Would really cleans out the European Commission and the European Council.

   

Some more precisions

What is not said in TFA.

The three step mentionned are optionnal. You can be banned from internet at the first time.
And the decision is not up to judges, as we can think, but to a new and "independent" (read leaded by the majors) entity. So very little to no possibility to contest the punition, since it's not french court that rule over it. Meh...
Moreover, the law try to push forward filtering of content, in order to detect "illegal" file sharing. That could prove useful to control population, in the future, isn't it ?

And if the media would accept to talk about it, maybe people could try and fight against this project, but you hardly hear a word about it out of computer oriented websites.

We're in for a wild time...

The issue is standards of proof

The issue is standards of proof. To be caught doing something illegal on the net three times may seem to justify disconnection. However, simply to be accused of it cannot. The fundamental problem here is economic. The rights owners cannot justify prosecution, because that demands a standard of proof of misconduct which is very expensive. You have to get the evidence, display it, allow it to be subject it to public questioning. Witnesses have to testify to how it was obtained.

This is an attempt to bypass all that. It is far cheaper to simply disconnect on three accusations. However, the problem is going to be EC human rights legislation and the first suit for false accusation. Human rights legislation is going to be a problem because the EC Charter explicitly guarantees access to information. You are only going to be able to ban someone from Internet access with the same sort of evidentiary justification that you would need to ban them from a public library or from reading the newspapers. The first suit for false denial of access to information is, for the same reason, going to be explosive. The ISPs will be acting as a cartel, so where one, acting alone, could throw anyone off for any reason, all acting together are in effect conspiring to deny the person access to information.

One supermarket may ban someone from shopping. If all start to subscribe to a common list, there's a human rights issue.

In the end this is not going to work because you cannot get around the requirement for high standards of proof before depriving people of what the EC, with a different hat on, has defined as their fundamental human rights. Hoist with their own petard, as they say in Brussels!

Wrong answer to the wrong problem

The trend nowadays in France is to complain about purchase power.

But the goverment is unwilling to lower taxes and the reccord industry is unwilling to lower their profits margin.

for instance a NIN CD sells 8 UKP (10EUR) the same CD sells 22EUR in France.

go figure why people are pirating

This will probably teach people to use encryption

Sofar people didn't have any big preasure to do so. I know, there are a lot of lazy people around, who just think: I don't care what happens to my computer. But I know enough people who do download and who wouldn't want to miss it.

So, how long does it take untill people run their download software in a virtual machine, completely seperated from the rest of the operating system, on a hiden true crypt partition and store the music/movies in the same way. And communication only over encrypted channels. Of course it has performance issues, but the computers are fast enough (and get faster).

And then let them cut of the internet? I would always defend myself and claim: false positive! And go public of course!

wrong summary

Dumb Internet Pirates In France To Lose Broadband

Internet Pirates In France With The Slightest Bit of Technical Acumen To Carry On As Usual

there, fixed that for you

Reality to media industry: Accept the truth

Dear media outlets: Please accept the fact that you are fighting a war that you cannot win. Even with custom-tailored laws at your will the internet won't change and piracy won't go away at large. It is also still doubtful that it is piracy what is causing your alledged losses and not a general loss of quality in and appreciation of music. For the latter part it's even you who is to blame: Music is nowadays everywhere - with your permission. Bad versions of your "hits" are sold as overly annoying cell phone ringtones - with your permission and appraisal.

Some parts of the media business already have learned that both giving away for free and piracy is actually increasing business, not hurting it. Eric Flint, a sci-fi writer has pointed this out: http://baens-universe.com/articles/salvos8 [baens-universe.com] and http://baens-universe.com/articles/The_Economics_of_Writing [baens-universe.com] Instead of treating your customers like shit, making a witch-hunt and introducing bull shit like DRM which only scares away your loyal customers towards piracy - pirated versions don't have silly limitations - you should finally realize that you need to do what every business in trouble need to do: Adapt. Or die. Whatever.

Sincerely
Reality

Re:what happened to the land of liberty?

what happened to the land of liberty?

Possibly the same thing that happened to UTF-8 encoder of your web browser?

Re:one funny side-effect

If you download Britney Spears ... you are already punished enough by what you get! No need to disconnect here...

Re:three warnings?

agreed 100%, and I am fully expecting the whole of slashdot to agree with you, as (from what i read here), the vast majority of people using p2p are doing it to download creative commons and open source programs and linux distributions. All that traffic to the piratebay is just people sharing their holiday photos etc.

I think it's pretty fair, if I get caught speeding i get fined instantly, I don't get given 2 warnings first.

And anyone who expects mass public campaigns against this needs to get out and speak to ordinary people. Most voters care about taxes, education, health and the economy, not whether or not their kids can keep maxxing out their bit-torrent speeds.

Re:three warnings?

If by "strike" you mean "being found guilty of some crime by a jury of your peers" then sure. But I don't think that's what the media companies have in mind.. considering that there are no laws which criminalize downloading of copyright restricted works - not even in France.

Re:three warnings?

If by "strike" you mean "being found guilty of some crime by a jury of your peers" then sure. But I don't think that's what the media companies have in mind..

Indeed. One of the big problems is that you can only appeal the final warning. I.e., if the first warnings were completely baseless (e.g., because you download a file with a name similar to some RIAA/MPAA blockbusters but with completely different content) and the final one turns out to be factual, then you're out too.