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French Senate Passes Anti-Piracy Internet Cut-Off Law
An anonymous reader writes "The French Senate has approved a three strikes law for Internet users who download copyrighted entertainment media without paying for it. If, after two warnings, a person continues to download pirated music and movies, the internet service providers would cut off access for a year. Quoting: 'The legislation passed with a massive cross-party majority of 297 votes to 15. Only a handful of conservatives, centrists and socialists voted against, while the Communists abstained. In passing the bill, the senators rejected an amendment proposed by senator Bruno Retailleau of the right-wing MPF party replacing internet cut-off with a fine. ... The bill sets up a tussle between France and Brussels. In September, the European Parliament approved by a large majority an amendment outlawing internet cut-off."
We discussed the introduction of this legislation several months ago.
I'll take the cynical stance and say that this is a good thing. We need fewer people on the Internet. We need to return the 'net to the state it was in circa '92.
Palm trees and 8
Car analogy:
You are a truck driver. You are caught on 3 occasions driving your truck through a gas station to skip a traffic light, regardless of whether or not you actually stopped to buy gas (in some states in the US, this is considered an illegal use of private property). As a result, you are prohibited from using public roads. Whether for driving your truck or your bicycle or even taking the public city bus, you are not allowed to do so for 1 year, because you didnt pay for something you may have had the right to access.
Seems only 15 out of 312+ members of the French Senate have managed to keep their heads out of their asses long enough to realize how much this law stinks.
Never mind that the government of a country should not be using its resources to protect private businesses from their own failing business model.
The internet has become an essential service for most people in today's world.
The law doesnt address how to resolve an issue of employees using the internet to download copyrighted material at work, if 4 employees do it at once, the entire business would lose internet for a year.
The law doesnt even specify that the downloading of copyrighted material must be illegal. If I go to cnn.com and download a podcast, I have downloaded copyrighted material from the internet and have not paid for it.
On the other hand, in many cases the validity of whether material is copyrighted is not apparent. If I download a torrent that contains copyrighted material that is not labeled as such, I have permission to do so from whoever uploads the material. If the source material is in fact copyrighted, I could lose my internet for downloading it from someone who downloaded from someone who downloaded it from the original host. I would have no way of knowing that the material was copyrighted. And thousands of people could lose internet access because of one person's actions.
This is a slippery slope that ends in transfer of information without a fee or a EULA impossible, which in the long run, turns the internet from the information superhighway into the worlds biggest electronic shopping mall.
Its not like we didnt have reasons to hate France before, but if this passes the lower house of the senate, I for one will be boycotting all things French (admittedly, that means I have to give up bottled water, but still, thats about 2/3 of France's economy, right?)
Passing a law against What everyone does is a risky affair. Sure, legislators have to go along with the concept that recorded media is property. As in the idea that a corporation can actually own a song or a movie, which is quite absurd, although accepted. A slight change in a note makes a different song, a minor re-edit or re-filming of the same plot makes a different movie. Which according to the bizarre theory of corporate ownership of 'intellectual property' creates an entirely new piece of property.
Add to this strange notion that everyone has the means to quite easily break this so-called law, since computers and telecommunications are ubiquitous, and you have a situation where it is easier to break a law than it is to obey it.
Which is not a stable situation. The law enforcers must either ignore the law in general, focus its enforcement on a specific minority group, or enforce the law equally against everyone. Enforcing against everyone changes the conditions that law is supposed to protect and is almost never done. Choosing between non-enforcement and selective enforcement is often a matter of culture. I would believe that the French law enforcement will not enforce this law against French citizens, only against foreigners and then only when the foreigners break other laws (or act outside of French cultural norms) and this law becomes one more weapon that can be used to make them conform.
Americans on the other hand are basically punitive people. Laws like this are specifically focused on targeted minorities for the specific purpose of incarcerating them for profit into private prisons, to steal their property, and to destroy their political clout. An example is the use of the drug possession laws being used to re-enslave the African-American non-middle-class youth. Each year the drug penalties get harsher and more focused on Blacks while White youth are given warnings and probation for the same 'offenses'. In America, copyright laws will be primarily used against young people who protest against any government actions.
These laws are perfect for that purpose. They can be widely broken with no ill effect to society as a whole (like the marijuana laws), and still be enforced brutally against specific individuals and groups. As long as the mainstream of people can continue to download music and movies without hassle, they will accept harsh punishments for the same downloading activity against young people who demonstrate against the government.
If McCain is elected, expect the criminalization of file downloading and harsh penalties applied against only the people who actively oppose government policies. This is the American way of doing things and there are many historical precedents for using harsh laws against harmless activities in this manner.
In France, a law has to be examined by the higher chamber (senate) and the lower chamber (national assembly) before it can be enforced. The national assembly has not yet examined this law. That means that the law which has been approved by the senate is not yet in its final form, and might undergo deep revisions before it is enforced.
This law was mainly pushed by Vivendi but there are powerful backers from all across the spectrum:
* Telecoms firms that want a mandate to filter all Internet traffic so that they can block all P2P, and then VoIP, and then video streaming and then anything which competes with their monopoly products.
* Large ISPs, because these are now all owned by the telecoms firms.
* Vendors like Cisco because they want to sell loads and loads of expensive filtering equipment.
* The music industry, because it still thinks it's going to sue its way back onto the right side of history. Stupid kloten, when will they learn?
* The movie industry, because they've drunk the music industry koolaid.
* The TV industry, because they want to sell more DVDs and because their distributors in the digital age are, of course, the ISPs.
* And finally, certain software firms, because the only way to implement this law, finally, is to use a fully locked down operating system that only runs authorized software, so no Linux.
The French tried so hard to get this same law pushed through the European Parliament, but that seems to be saner.
There are similar legislative pushes all around Europe, at the national level, and for the same reasons.
The Internet is, really, under attack from concerted and powerful forces that hate what those free packets represent.
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I heard there will be extra penalties if the downloads weren't in French...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!