Major Battle Brewing Between French Gov't and ISPs

Dangerous_Minds writes "Drew Wilson has been following HADOPI (France's three strikes law) a lot lately, and the latest developments are that the French ISPs and the French government are edging closer to a full-on war over compensation. The French government apparently requested that ISPs send an invoice of the bills after a certain period of time, but the French ISPs don't feel this is good enough — probably because of worries that the compensation the government will ultimately provide won't be enough. The ISPs are demanding adequate compensation, and if the government doesn't give it to them, they simply will not hand over evidence required to enforce HADOPI law. While HADOPI demands that ISPs cooperate, speculation suggests that if the government takes ISPs to court, the ISPs will simply rely on constitutional jurisprudence to shield them from liability (translation)."

Comments

Never gonna happen

[elrous0]

Getting the French government to surrender? That seems unlikely.

Re:Never gonna happen

[Errol backfiring]

Maybe if they disconnect the government from the internet. It is standard practice if you don't pay your ISP.

Gotta side with the ISPs on this one

[Pojut]

Monitoring and fulfilling information requests costs time and money. If they're being required to do so constantly, chances are they had to bring on temporary staff to keep up with the worklog. It's wholly unfair to demand this of them, and yet not compensate them.

Then again, "fair", "business", and "government" don't go together, so ::shrug::.

Re:Gotta side with the ISPs on this one

[wisnoskij]

It is not necessarily unfair.
Even if I do not agree in regulating the net.
business need to deal with the unpleasant results of their business as well as making money.
The oil companies for example are not paid by the government to run safe rigs and to clean up their spills, the government forces them to do that if they want to remain in the oil business.

Re:Gotta side with the ISPs on this one

[Pojut]

Using your examples of oil companies, it is true that they aren't necessarily payed to run safe rigs...however, the government is a huge customer of theirs (military, government official vehicles, etc) as well as providing them legislation that works in their favor and tax breaks/keeping tax loopholes open.

They aren't directly payed money, but approve or disapprove, they're still compensated.

Wow Brilliant

[Haedrian]

So the government buckled to pressure from large 'content-producing' corporations - and our only defense is are other large corporations who don't want to comply because it hurts their wallets.

Not because they think its a bad idea, respect their customers or whatever, because it hurts their wallet.

What a giant mess this world is - money driven. When are the revised copyright laws coming out? No there's no large company which wants that, oh allright - Never O'Clock

Re:Wow Brilliant

[Joce640k]

They should cut out the middle man - let the content producers compensate the ISPs directly. Surely it's a small price for them to pay if it's going to prevent billions of Euros in lost sales due to piracy, it's also a short-term thing because the biggest pirates will disconnected within a couple of months.

Re:Europe

[kevinNCSU]

Europeans fighting and killing other Europeans?! Inconceivable!!

Law that should not exist

[betterunixthanunix]

When enforcing the law creates an undue burden on society -- tax dollars are not enough, private industries dollars are not enough, and people continue to break the law anyway -- perhaps it is time to ask, "Does this law even make sense?"

Oh, wait, the copyright lobby -- I forgot that their interests trump everything, even logic.

Hadopi scammers

[airfoobar]

In related news, today TechDirt posted about scammers starting to send out fake Hadopi notices asking random people for money.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100902/02075110872.shtml

This is really turning out to be a FAIL of EPIC proportions.