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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).
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?
The US is only marginally better. It wont be long before something equally intrusive and anti-freedom happens here. The entertainment industry needs to get put in their place GLOBALLY.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
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...