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In France, Hadopi Reporting Begins, With (Only) 10,000 IP Addresses Per Day
mykos writes with an excerpt from TorrentFreak that says the automated enforcement of France's three-strikes law known as Hadopi is now coming into effect: "The scope of the operation is mind boggling. The copyright holders will start relatively 'slowly' with 10,000 IP-addresses a day, but within weeks this number is expected to go up to 150,000 IP-addresses per day according to official reports. The Internet providers will be tasked with identifying the alleged infringers' names, addresses, emails and phone numbers. If they fail to do so within 8 days they risk a fine of 1,500 euros per day for every unidentified IP-address. To put this into perspective, a United States judge ruled recently that the ISP Time Warner only has to give up 28 IP-addresses a month (1 per day) to copyright holders because of the immense workload the identifications would cause."
So basically copyright holders in France have free reign to find out who any IP address belonged to. With such volumes of request, there's no way their validity will be questioned in any way. Likely the whole system will soon be automated.
And are the *copyright holders* tasked with identifying the same amount of copyright material, verifying it (which would presumably involve downloading a substantial proportion of it themselves, otherwise it's just hearsay - "Yes, your honour, I saw this IP address connect to this tracker asking for this file. Even though it's called "Aliens" I can't tell you the content because it *obvious* that it must be the Hollywood film of the same name"), its original IP address, the copyright holder (i.e. if they find infringing material that isn't under *their* copyright, are they obliged to notify the authorities and/or the person whose copyright it is? Surely otherwise they are deliberately ignoring a crime? That could get interesting).
It's one of those laws that'll be in fashion and then in a year's time the copyright holders will all be complaining that it's insufficient and not effective and too much work for them and they'll give up on it. Hopefully they *have* bitten off more than they could chew and ISP's therefore have to employ dozens of staff, double their broadband prices etc. to keep up and that'll provide a pretty clear economic oversight to those implementing that law and, most importantly, putting some of that burden on the ISP's.
And all for a letter dropping through the door where people reply saying "It wasn't me, my son visited/dog did it/wireless was hacked/computer caught a virus/etc." and you have to go to court to try to prove it eventually anyway (cutting off your broadband for alleged but unproven infringements sounds a pretty good way to waste the courts time too, and they take much less kindly to that).
THIS is why I'm voting Pirate Party next time around.
I believe P2P is only hurting sales a few percent at most and this reaction is way out of proportion.
No sig today...
There's 62277432 people in France, using the world bank 2008 estimate (See a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=population+of+france").
We generously assume that they have one Internet connection each.
With 150000 IP addresses warned every day, that's 50,000 people cut off every day (assuming the volume keeps up).
At that rate, it takes 1246 days to cut off everybody, which is fairly precisely 3.5 years.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
Ok, the US example isn't really putting anything into perspective. Here's a better way to do that.
France has a population of 60 million. If 150k letters are sent every day, then we get: 60,000,000 / 150,000 = 400. The entire population of France can be canvassed with Hadopi notices in a little more than a year.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité and all that bullshit are far behind them now.
The copyright holders will start relatively 'slowly' with 10,000 IP-addresses a day, but within weeks this number is expected to go up to 150,000 IP-addresses per day according to official reports.
150,000 names per day for a whole year is nearly 55 million names. Will the entertainment industry just skip on the rigmarole and simply do a class-action suit against the totality of the french population?
It's not the ISPs who'll suffer - they can automate the process - it's the court system.
I'd love to see 150,000 court cases brought every day, all for downloading a couple of mp3s but the sad fact is that most cases won't go much further than sending a letter or two.
No sig today...
In other news VPN providers in France reporting record profits :-)
You signed up for a filthy corrupt fascist regime. This is the shit that comes with it. Enjoy.
Projects like http://freenetproject.org/ will be very very popular soon in France I guess.
Solutions like this provide:
- Encryption
- Anonymity
- Credible deniability
- Darknets
These kind of solutions do not work very fast at the moment because of the limited number of users. There was never really the need. Now there is and people will flock to it in big numbers. As the number of users start to rise, it will become very big, very fast.
Two years from now they will be in exactly the same spot, except they will not even be able to track the problem anymore. A bit of ironic justice I guess...
Wonder how many false accusations will result from this operation.
LOTS. Considering how trivial it is to forge an IP address on a peer to peer network, and how simple it is to find which IP addresses are french, they are one 4chan meme away from the whole country going dark.
If someone has the IP addresses of the French parliament members, that would be a good place to start, IMHO.
The more automated they make it, the more vulnerable it would be to this sort of thing. If it's too hard to get the personal IP addresses of French parliament members, I would imagine it wouldn't be as hard to get some IP addresses associated with various French government agencies. It may not be quite as direct and personal, but if it's the low-hanging fruit...
I want a significant percentage of the population to lose their internet connections, I want them to be pissed off and I want to see the digital economy realise what a totally useless abomination Hadopi is. I want them all to point their fingers at that loser Sarkozy and the "entertainment" industry who pushed this through despite all the warnings, and I want them both to be thrown out of power and out of France.
Here's to wishing..
Sorry for the self-reply, I made a mistake... It's 150.000 per *day*, not per month! I actually calculated it right the first time and thought: "wait, that can't be right, I probably switched days and months...". Nope, I did that by mistake after that... So sadly the real calculation is:
150.000 IPs per day = 13,5 million households in 90 days = 3 months!!! So assuming the they have a lot more broadband connections since 2008 it would be around 4 months!
in just 4 months the media company will already own the personal details of *all* French households with internet!!!
Fuck, how crazy are they! The 21st century French revolution is pretty much guaranteed if people are screwed over by the millions at this pace.
This law is retarded.
So is the tax that the french pay on CD/HDD to compensate for artists losses.
So is a lot of filesharing/copyright "protection" enforcement.
But let's not forget it's illegal to download a song or movie you didn't pay for.
Yes, I know, movie studios are producing movies without scenarios, music labels are abusing artists, blah blah blah. We've heard this before.
But is "ok let's download their stuff, that will teach'em a lesson" the appropriate response? Really? I fail to see the logic here. I'd much rather punish them as consumers usually do, by not buying their sh*t. Not by "stealing" from them (yes, that's stealing, even if bits aren't really tangible (well, they are, but you know what I mean)).
Yes, I am aware this post will be modded down into oblivion as "music and movies, just like information, want to be free".
Banning the hijab makes sense as does the gypsy expulsion.
It's only lost revenue if the person making the copy would have bought it. If they never had an intention of making a purchase, there was no potential for revenue gain to begin with.
As an example, say that you hear a song on the radio (which is free!) and you decide to check out the band. Their CD is $20 and has 9 songs you've never heard, plus the one you liked. You decide you won't buy the CD. Instead, you get a tape deck and record the song off the radio the next time you hear it. Now you can listen to the song whenever you want, and have managed to do nothing illegal. Replace the tape deck with a computer that downloaded the song you liked.... and suddenly you've done something illegal. There's no functional difference between the two scenarios, so why is one legal but the other isn't?