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French Assembly Adopts 3-Strikes Bill
An anonymous reader writes "After lots of turmoil, including a surprise rejection and a European amendment against it, Sarkozy's 3 strikes law has just been passed by the French Assembly [in French]: 'The first warning mails ... should be sent in the coming fall. In case of second offenders, the first disconnections should start beginning 2010.'"
We all know it wasn't decided on merit.
How long until offenders start using the easily accessible encryption to avoid losing their connections? This will effectively make it harder for rights holders who have legitimate claims to go after offenders.
Whenever you pull the pendulum in one direction, it always swings back in the other one.
I hope the Internet era will put a stop to this type of politicans.
I can't wait to see how this thing blows in his face.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
With more and more gov services being available on the internet, does that mean that those disconnected won't be able to use said services?
So is this France's rejection of EU sovereignty in these matters?
And if so, will consequences might France experience for rejecting an EU ruling?
How about jail for incorrect expenses and graft 3 times. That's more than a mistake, that's fraud. Yet politicians get away with this shit way too often, regardless of country. Can anyone name a politician that was even *fired* for it, let alone charged? They're all allowed to resign, step down, or otherwise voluntarily leave office. I think that's wrong. Most jobs, you're caught pulling that stuff, you're escorted out of the building.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
I didn't RTFA.
Is there a dispute resolution mechanism if I happen to be a Frenchman who's been falsely accused three times (I'm not French, and I haven't been accused of filesharing, I'm just curious).
You could take it to the courts, but AFAIK there's no built-in tribunal for disputes. You might have trouble once you're there, since the law gives authority to cut your connection after three accusations by the industry, not three proven cases of infringement. If, for instance, you were to write publicly about the issue in a critical tone, the industry could say, "I don't like you" three times fast and you'd be disconnected with no clear means of recourse. They don't even have to tell you you've been accused - the warning notes are optional.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Which country has incarcerated the largest fraction of its population?
Sadly, unless you're part of the cartel of industry organizations which bought and paid for this "legislation" - your complaints will be ignored.
It's not the words on the paper that define the law.
It's the money that paid for them.
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
The french presidential majority, you mean. Don't mistake the french with their politicians, or we could all think you're clones of G.W. Bush :)
The major problem of the 3-strike law is that it's a read-guard action that does essentially nothing (at worst) and completely ignores economic forces (at best).
30 years ago, in 1979, if I wanted to get a permanent copy of some content - say, a novel -, I would have to purchase a bunch of paper, some inks, find the appropriate tools (thank god, Xerox already existed), spend a couple hours preparing stuff, and would end with my copy of the novel. At the same time, a professional content copier - which I would call, say, a printer - would purchase paper at a discount compared to me, inks the same, have the tools ready for use, spend 1/1000th of the time I did per copy. Requiring the services of a professional content duplicator to make my copy of some content made economical sense.
Today, making a copy of some content involves about a milliwatt or so of electricity, a tool I already have, and 5s of my index or middle finger to do copy/paste. Using a professional content duplicator to make a copy of some content is an economically non-viable proposition, no matter how you turn around things. You cannot justify charging 15$ to make a DVD copy of a movie when I can make the same copy, at the same quality level, for one cent. And when I purchase your DVD, from my point of view, I am paying somebody 15$ for making a copy for me. That's good, if your DVD is a luxury item. But for a common economy good? Not working.
The profession of content duplicator is dead. Or dying. Like any profession that is no longer economically justified, it will go, like the hordes of people who slaved at hand looms to make cloths when Mr. Jacquart came with his automatic looms. They yelled, they ranted, they ran into the streets (hmmm, how many popular showings of movie industry people have we seen in the streets so far?). And in the end, they went, for no one would pay triple or worse prices for the same product.
The entire content industry is running in circles because, for good or worse, they all have hitched their cart to the profession of content duplicator. We still need people to create content (we call them artists). We still need businesses to find "good" content creators from the masses and advertise this content (we call them editors). We still need businesses to take the raw content, polish it, make sure it's well done (we call them producers). We even need business to deliver that content to us (we used to call them retail chains). What we no longer need is content duplicators. However, the whole content industry has decided (well, evolved) around the content duplicator. Why else are artists paid by the copy, if not because they use the content duplicator as the driver of their revenue. Everyone else in the industry does. Steve Jobs knew it when he was asked if he favored Blu-ray or HD-DVD: he said it didn't matter, because the idea of making expensive copies of content was already dying.
With that profession dying, they need to find out new methods of doing those services, and get paid. One segment of the content industry has already found it: the distributors. The guys who are delivering the content to the consumers are already there; they're called ISPs, and they charge people for the delivery of content - any content - and they're happy. They don't care if the content is subcription-based TV, iTunes songs, web pages, or BitTorrent P2P streams. They have found out the new business model of content delivery, and they're ready for the 21st century. The rest of the content profession still hasn't figured out, or, in the case of the old delivery channels will be dead. As usual when business models change, most of the old business go titsup and new business appear instead - only rarely will an existing business figure out it needs changing, figure out how it will change, and do it.
And when they have figured out how to live without the content duplicators, then HADOPI will become like all those laws that require you to keep your riding crop in hand when crossing another vehicle: something that's completely irrelevant.
I had a boss, who used to suggest with total seriousness that all politicians should be sent directly to jail after they serve their terms; without trial, without jury, straight from their table to their cell.
I just laughed at this as though it's a joke. But he never showed a joking manner with his opinion. It was often haunting, but the more he insisted on a poker face when saying the more I thought about it.
His claim is that all politicians are liars, and due to the gravity of their lies (in affecting the masses), their crimes have far reaching consequences and hence they should all go directly to jail after they serve for the rest of their lives.
I used to say, 'but we would have no politicians then', to which he said 'good'.
Funny though, he didn't seem to mind the man-behind-the-curtains, in the sense of the CEO of a locally publicly traded international business... who, he never voted for, nor even could identify by name or photo, having probably done more to influence his life than any politician has. For, the politicians he blames, were told what to do by Big Business.
It's only in light of this perspective that I would agree with my boss. Not on grounds of them lying, but more on the grounds they are supposed to serve the people, and not the companies. Since their fibs are a result of Big Business, and they choose Corporate spoils over the People.
I agree with my boss. They all should go directly to jail for not protecting the People.
Encryption cannot solve this problem. For filesharing to work, peers who have data must somehow advertise this fact. It doesn't matter if that data is encrypted; you still know what it is and who has it.
There are only two things filesharers can do:
1. Try to restrict the people that they advertise to so that they are not caught by the authorities. Here, there are conflicting goals: In order to have lots of data available, you want the largest network possible. But in order to keep things secure, you need as few people in on it as possible. So the more pressure the copyright groups put on the networks, the more the equilibrium shifts towards smaller (and less valuable) networks.
2. Give data to intermediaries who pass it on. Either this is done with something like onion routing, or sites like rapidshare are used as the intermediaries. This relies on being able to trust the intermediaries to whom you are adjacent. There also must be some incentive for the intermediaries to pass on your data. In the case of onion routing, the incentive is that other people's traffic serves as "noise" which your own traffic can "hide" in. In the case of Rapidshare et al, it's simply cash, through a combination of paid memberships and advertising revenue.
Neither #1 nor #2 are encryption, really, though #2 may involve some.
A physical DVD, including packaging, is close to $1.50. Now, you can copy a DVD, but can you produce the movie that is on that DVD? No, I didn't think so. Arguing that the only thing of value involved in DVD production is the physical medium is asinine.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"