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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?
After months of bullying and sneakiness, he finally got it through, and well done.
But I won't feel much sympathy when the cut-off peasants storm his gates holding pitchforks, hot pokers and rope.
Don't you just wish that polititions were subject to three strikes too? Get caught three times in a lie, or claiming invalid expenses, or outright graft, and you get a life time ban on holding any political office ( or lobbying ), don't pass go, don't collect any of your pensions, just get the f*ck out of here.
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?
Sarkozy was elected. Seems to be the worst thing to happen to France in a long time.
We've built a network designed to share information across vast distances very cheaply. This is a very good thing.
Being able to share your movies with people across a continent the same way you would in your living room is a feature.
Allowing people to share books with one another and learn from them is a feature.
Letting people remix content from artists and share it with the world is a feature.
Telling people they cannot speak, read, listen or watch because they're part of the future and not part of the past is a bug.
I should imagine that some French Government organization will be caught downloading allegedly illegal content. Then, of course, the government will have to follow the letter of the law and cut off its own Internet Service. That should be fun to watch. Or, someone will get fired, internet service will not be suspended and they will reference Nixon's famous quote, about if they do it its not illegal, or they will reference Bush, who followed Nixon's fine example of little emperorism.
It has only passed the lower chamber. Now it has to be approved by the Senate with the exact same wording. In case a coma is changed, the assembly will have to debate, edit and vote again the law. Then it will have the pass the check of the constitutional council which could take down large chunks of the law. In other words, the battle is not over yet and the relief could come from Europe. Wait, fight, and see.
Start e-mailing links to copyrighted material and get the government's internet shutdown, and if they don't shut themselves off then start suing and having them charged with corruption until they force them to repeal their bill.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
We should just imprison the planet and be done with it.
What makes you think we haven't? How far can you go without a passport?
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
Okay so you lost internet. How many minutes does it take you to figure out that letters full of 16gb microSD cards actually have higher bandwidth than your connection? Quite abysmal ping though, but there's public acess points for the latency critical applications.
Yeah I'm glad I live in the US, where our government would NEVER sell us out to business interests!
At least they have better wine and cheese.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
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)
Of course they have it there. They don't call it the "World Series" because it's limited to the Americas~.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
No. After your Highspeed connection has been terminated (without due process of law i.e. a jury trial), you're forced to go back to using the telephone lines for your internet (50 kbit/s dialup). Yay.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
How about a little context with my stuff that matters?
Suddenly the entire editorial staff burst out in a fit of riotous laughter.
Still it would be nice for a court to decide when you did the first one.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Or internet cafes will become REALLY popular places.
as for granmas... since they like to click on all these "fix your computer" and "you won" stuff, (not to forget about grandchildren that would be happy to use granmas computer), it is just a matter of time till someone will bombard the France with trickery ads that will download some easily trackable music. Once more then some percentage of population (say 15-20% ?) will not be able use internet from homes, then or the ISPs will put a blind eye on it (they losing customers), or new amendments will have to pass. Or they will create go the way as auto insurance does -- you can connect, but the fees are prohibitive.
just speculating...
So what would happen if someone used a bot net to get half of France banned from the internet.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I am not a supporter of copyright infringement. I am, however, a passionate supporter of due process. If they will not abide by due process, disappear.
Start building your darknet, today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_(file_sharing)
Don't use it for copyright infringement, that would be illegal. But use it to make everything you do on the Internet much harder to detect. If they are going to use our openness against us, we must stop being open.
It's a little hard to set up a darknet right now, but it will get better if we all work together. Now go forth and start the hard work of remaining free.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
As near as I can tell, using only a car, I can go 6,121 km without needing to bring a passport. Seeing as it is before June I could probably make it to the south of Mexico which would stretch it a fair bit further but either way seeing as the distance I could travel in a cell is measured in feet I don't think it matters much. Why don't you go live in a cell while I drive cross country and see who has more fun.
Which country has incarcerated the largest fraction of its population?
There's an easy solution to this.
Disconnect France from the internet until they stop this nonsense.
Question everything
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.
So,
How long do you think it will be before someone figures out a way to use/fake Sarkozy's IP addresses (or all government IP's?) for obviously illegal P2P and get them knocked off the net?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prisoner_population_rate_UN_HDR_2007_2008.PNG
What makes you think we haven't? How far can you go without a passport?
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=worcester,+uk&daddr=p%C3%A9cs&hl=en&geocode=&mra=ls&sll=48.785735,9.39988&sspn=13.587171,28.300781&ie=UTF8&ll=49.21042,8.349609&spn=13.470776,28.300781&z=5
Big enough prison for me, thank you.
So, to paraphrase a famous person who didn't say it, *6,121 km oughta be good enough for everybody* That about right?
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
Does that show historical values, like, say, WW2?
Australia?
I think that Carla Bruni, Sarkozy's wife and model/singer, is the real author of the bill. In fact, the two first met at a official function where Bruni had come to promote copyright enforcement and authors' rights. IMO, Sarkozy is just acting out of love for his wife. The man is dangerous.
While I agree with the overall sentiment, there's one serious caveat in your example here:
"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."
What you are doing is copying the data, not the physical DVD. It's the physical DVD that costs the bulk of that $15 price: The DVD itself (which is pressed, not burned onto a generic writable media as your version would be) with the silk-screened label, the plastic case and the outer jacket at a minimum. Even a blank DVD will cost you about 20 cents.
This is not to suggest the physical media market isn't obsolete - but if you're going to complain about the costs you need to at least compare apples to apples: When you buy a DVD, you physically have a DVD.
=Smidge=
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.
Except for the fact that the physical DVD is NOT "the bulk of that $15 price". Not by a long shot.
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
I guess this means French file sharers will be moving to anonymous p2p programs like FreeNet, GnuNet, etc and darknets. This is silly, bring it all out in the open, money can be made if the price is low and service good, for example allofmp3.com. No rubbish about the artists will be cheated, they are badly cheated in the existing system:
Trent Reznor : "One of the biggest wake-up calls of my career was when I saw a record contract. I said, 'Wait - you sell it for $18.98 and I make 80 cents? And I have to pay you back the money you lent me to make it and then you own it? Who the f**k made that rule? Oh! The record labels made it because artists are dumb and they'll sign anything'
Lets make a new system and pay the artists the lion share and let them own their music. Where an artists work can be got from multiple competing vendors. The artists and their fans is the more important thing. These fat middle men need to go on a slimfast diet and get the hell out the way. As for TV, Mark Pesce told the world that in 2005 http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html. Movies the same, plus we are still going to go to the cinema.
There are many ways this could work, but the world has changed and law makers legal world offers a tiny fraction of what this new world has to offer. Are they just too old fashioned? Still struggling with email let alone file sharing and hooking up the TV with the computer...
I don't know about California's laws on domestic violence, but in Texas I was arrested twice for defending myself against my wife. (I was young and stupid... don't judge) The first time, I was restraining her wrists. The second time she was swinging a katana at me while I was holding our son. Fortunately it was before the felony charge became mandatory. I am not married to her any longer and haven't been for a very long time, but I have to say, the way the law is enforced is really very unfair and uneven. They did eventually arrest her for the assault with a deadly weapon but later dropped those charges... she wouldn't stop crying. What women get away with amazes me.
In any case, my point is that perhaps this first "violent felony" was a guy just like me or you who wanted only to prevent harm to himself where the assaulting party was a woman.
I can still see and hear the Irving, TX cops telling me "yes!" when I asked "was I supposed to just LET her kill me?" The whole experience was surreal...
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"
And funnily, as I said before, the first one to actually lose his first strike, was Sarkozy himself: http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSTRE53R1V120090428
I also proposed how to make him take his medicine own the two other times too. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Sadle, this nerd site was written in Perl, which was a write-only language oddly popular in the 20th century. Perl scripts cannot be maintained, so they'd have to write Slashcode over again to add UTF-8 support (or add it back, didn't Slashcode support it briefly?).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
What do you think is more important - limiting the difference between the rich and the poor, or increasing everyone's standard of living? You do realize there's a trade-off between these two goals, right? If you can only do one, do you want to live better, or just make that rich bastard live worse so that you're better by comparison.
These are honest questions, not flamebait. Personally, I wish everyone well, and would like eveyrone to live as well as they can manage. But it seems a great many people are offended by others living better thna they do, regardless of how ell they live themselves, and would be quite happy to cut off their noses to spite their faces. Which camp are you in?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
An element of Hadopi which hasn't received much or enough attention as yet, is a section which specifies steps that can be taken by computer users to ensure that they will not be found liable under the new regime. The following is a rough translation of the relevant sections, taken from the text of the law in its current state, as found here. Bear with me, it is torturous, some explanatory notes are added in bold...
Art. L. 331-30. â" After consultation with those developing security systems designed to prevent the illicit use of access to a communication service to the public online (internet!), or electronic communications, people whose business it to offer access to such a service (ISPs) as well as those companies governed by title 2 of the book (Intellectual Property Code) and rightsholders organizations (ie SACEM etc), the High Authority will make public the pertinent functional specifications that these measures must comprise so as to be considered, in its eyes, as valid exoneration of the responsibility of the access subscriber (internet user!) as defined in article L. 336-3.
At the end of a certified evaluation procedure, and taking into consideration conformity with the specifications set out in the previous paragraph and their effectiveness, the High Authority will issue a list certifying the security software whose use will validly exonerate the access holder (internet user!) from their responsibility under the terms of article L. 336-3. This certification will be periodically revised.
Mmmh. So what the law intends is to set up a meeting between consultation with security software vendors, antipiracy organizations and ISPs to decide what software you need to install on your machine, so that they can be sure that you behave yourself. If you don't fancy installing their device, then you'll just have to swallow any liability consequent to someone else using your machine or accessing your connection.
Art. L. 336-3. â" The access holder to an online service of communication to the public (internet!) or electronic communications is obliged to ensure that thus access is not used for purposes of reproduction, display, making available, or communication to the public, of works protected by copyright or a neighboring right, without the authorisation of the holders of those rights set out in books 1 and 2 (of the Intellectual Property Code), where required.
Failure to satisfy the obligation set out in the preceding paragraph can result in a punishment according to the conditions defined by article L. 331-25.
No sanction can be taken regarding the access holder in the following cases:
1. If the access holder (internet user!) installed on of the security systems appearing on the list mentioned in the second paragraph of article L. 331-30;
2. If the attack on the rights set out in the first paragraph of the present article is the work of a person who has fraudulently used the access to the online communication service;
3. In case of force majeure.
The failure of the access holder to the obligation defined in the first paragraph will not have the effect of imposing criminal liability.
Apart from finding the last paragraph a bit puzzling â" the list of exceptions exempts from all liability, the coda refers only to criminal liability â" and the language atrocious, it's obvious the whole framework is mad and unacceptable. Imposing such strict liability unless users agree to install spyware, almost certainly connected to remote databases, is intrusive as well as dangerous.
How can this not amount to a wholesale surveillance of online activity? Who will have access to the data collected and transmitted by these 'security systems' (sic), and how will that access be managed? Will the security systems be transp
You do need a passport. Well, not need need, since no one is checking it at the borders, but if the police in another EU country ask for it you need to be able to present it. Some places a EU citizenship card doubles as a passport but they don't have those in the UK or eastern europe.
Bullshit. I've spent 8 months in the UK with no passport. EU law says if you have an EU citizenship, your ID is fully functional as a passsport throughout the EU. The only place they checked my papers from London to Budapest was the UK-French border, and even there the driver remarked that they're only doing that because we have a lot of dark-skinned passengers with an apparent genome line not originally from Europe.
Yes, racism exists, and it's based on experience.
The question is, which outcome will lead to a stable and prosperous society. Best evidence shows that humans decide whether they are prosperous based on their comparisons to their neighbors. The gap between the super wealthy and the very poor, therefor is the problem - especially as the middle and working classes continue to get poorer, while the very wealthy throw toga parties.
You did raise a false choice, based on some invalid conclusions. History has shown us that when the middle and lower classes prosper, so do the upper classes. That stands in stark contrast to the conditions that arise from an imbalance in the distribution of resources like the imbalance that exists today - hunger, homelessness - instability, violence. Check the news, we are solidly on our way.
I don't wish to live in a third world country, one like the state of things during the gilded age, with sweat shops and child labor. But that is where we are headed based on the evidence (high unemployment numbers, lower and decreasing median income numbers against inflation, low debt free homeownership, high personal debt rates, violent attacks on police and other random acts, etc.) of recent years - even before the economic problems of recent months (though that did accelerate already worsening problems).
The working and middle classes have been pretending to be prosperous, utilizing large amounts of credit card debt (that bubble is next to pop by the way), in addition to the obscene amount of housing debt they had been collecting. The reality is, they couldn't, and still can't afford to live that kind of life. The funny thing about credit - it's a loan, and it costs money. People were naive to believe that a loan or a credit card made them more wealthy.
More of the same is more of a shift in wealth to the already wealthy while the rest of us get poorer, and lose out homes (again, the evidence is clear here). The fix is easy enough, we just need to will to do it. Spread the wealth around (the opposite of what is happening now) through fairer compensation laws - no need for handouts. And we even have history to show us how well that works - take a look at the New Deal (a deal put in place to stave off socialism, not to encourage it - gotta get with the history!). More people prosper in that situation - including the very wealthy.
Also, I couldn't care less about their perceived money problems, just to express my actual anger at these people and their greedy entitlement mentalities. ;-P
Also, also, I appreciate the moderate tone you took with your comments. We could use more of that. The yelling is not productive. :-)
http://www.unfocus.com/
First, don't talk about copy. Content business will have to stop being about copies to survive in a world of ubiquitous cheap copying. Aside, that's the thoughie: right now, everybody in the content industry has its cart hitched on the per-copy model.
Each author gets paid by the (sold) copy. However, if you look at the copyright legislation, you'll see that's not a feature. There's nothing in law that dictates that an author must be paid by the copy. It's just that they (the authors) are used to that model. Heck, they even have evolved complex models to account for the correct number of copies for their payments - and if you dare miscount, why, they'll sue you. But there's no base law that requires authors to be paid so, it's just that it's "how it's been always done".
Do I have a solution? No. If I did, I would probably have started a content business of the 21st century. Someone will figure out a good model. Meanwhile, everybody tries to animate the zombie of the old model so they can get some useful work out of it. Will it cause a lot of people to lose their jobs? Probably - that's how every major technical progress did: previous business dies, new business with lower overhead rises instead. You get more jobs when you invent something that no one consumed before, but that's not the case here.
Some countries are readying themselves for the new models. I read someone speaking about China and the music business there. He said that artists based their living on performances, tours, private concerts, whatever. No one expected much money to come from recordings - every recording is going to be duplicated and distributed at close to zero cost, so they don't try to compete with the zero-cost non-professional duplication; they just make money otherwise. Your music recordings are treated as advertising. And that's they country we're trying to strangle with ACTA and the like, and force to move out from the 21st century business era back to the 19th century one under the various threats of commercial sanctions "if you don't copy our obsolete and unviable US models".
can you produce the movie that is on that DVD?
Had you read your parent's full post, you would have discovered this:
We still need people to create content (we call them artists).
He also says some words about editors, producers and retailers near that bit. I suggest you read it, it's quite interesting.
It puts the whole "DVDs should be cheap" bit in perspective.
Artists won't go away just because they get paid less. Speaking as an artist myself, I can testify that it's a calling, and most artists would keep on doing what they love, even if they didn't get paid. Of course, they'd have a smaller budget... but good things can still be made on the cheap. Audio equipment and software has become so cheap that ordinary people on a shoestring budget can produce an album surpassing the typical audio quality of major bands, and the way things are going, movies will become just as cheap and easy to make.
The notion that art will somehow stop unless the MAFIAA gets total leeway in prosecuting pirates is a widely propagated myth.
Oh great, some smartass with a botnet could get all of France banned from the internet..
Bavarian Purity Law of Rice Krispie Squares: Rice Krispies, Marshmallows, Butter, Vanilla.