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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."
If 10% resolve to a proxy server in Korea, then what? Someone in france running a proxy server is about to get a shitload of mail.
I call BS on the 1-per-day thing for Time Warner - you're seriously telling me that your IP addresses are given out by computers, to routers with unique MAC addresses which you use for billing / service tier purposes, and you can't automate a process that matches a given DHCP lease to a given customer? Pull the other one, it's got bells on.
Or in other words, by this time next year, the media cartel with have lookup tables of every single consumer IP address owner in France, because for a population of 62 million, many of whom aren't online, or share an IP, that's all it'll take at the given rate.
Worse, because it'll be so costly for ISPs, they'll have more incentive to just assign a static IP per subscriber and create lookup tables themselves. Effectively this is the end of any amount of online privacy in France, if you connect to the net their, before long your IP and your name, phone number, home address, and e-mail address will be easily matched- what're the chances of such lookup tables staying secure and private indefinitely?
Something is going to go seriously wrong with this system one way or another, it's either going to kill off ISPs, or it's going to suffer torential backlash and be revoked, or in perhaps the worst case, it's going to make the online population of France the biggest target of tracking, identity theft, and scams in history.
The technology already exists for the ISP to resolve an IP address to a specific customer. How else would they be able to disable your access if you stop paying your internet bills? Blaming it on the technology being to hard and to costly is just weak. Whether it is a good idea to have private companies divulge private information about their customers to other private companies without going through the judicial process or not, is a different question altogether.
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If they've automated the process* then you can bet a lot of 'secret' requests will be made, too. Who's visiting which websites? Who's on the other end of an instant messenger? Who's reading which tweets?
[*] Let's face it, it's not going to be clerks reading printouts...
No sig today...
ACTA is bringing that to the rest of the World. One Camembert to rule them all.
Dear SACEM and record companies selling stuff in France,
Because of the HADOPI law and the way you treated your potential customers for the past years, because of the fact that I have to pay a "copyright" tax on every blank media I buy, and because I've been offered a guitar, I'm pissed off to the point I'll do something tangible in my life.
TV has already been replaced mostly by books, tabletop games, and a few YouTube videos every other week. As for music, I'm learning the guitar, I don't need you anymore, I won't give you my money anymore, it's over, I'll make my own music and entertain my family by myself.
Also, fuck you...
Is there anything requiring the ISP's to provide the data in machine readable format? Could they collect the info automatically and then export it to something like a low res JPG file before they submit it to the copyright holders? If so that would be an effective way to drive up their costs and 'throttle' the system
Well unfortunately you don't get off the hook simply by saying that it wasn't you, you have to prove it wasn't you and if you do, you still get fined because you neglected the security of your network installation.
To "help" people with securing their network, the french government issued a 200+ pages specification for a software that would secure your computer and prevent it from being used to downlaod illegal content.
The specification requires the program to be one the best malware ever created, able to disrupt anti virus and anti spyware so it's not removed by error, hidden so the process can't be killed by the user, so the program can't be uninstalled, logs in both a crypted and an unencrypted files all network actions of the machine, etc etc
Basically the best spyware ever. This is on the market for a contractor to realize. Oh and obviously people will have to buy it to comply with the network security requirements.
I cant' wait for the first lawsuits.
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.
No you see it wrong.
They need three strikes to disconnect a subscriber. Say on average three people sharing a connection (a typical household size, won't be much off for France), and assume every household has an Internet connection (that's a sure over-estimation of course), that makes just over 20 mln subscribers in France.
Now say all of them are involved in the regular illegal sharing of copyrighted material (another overestimation).
Three strikes means some 60 mln notices.
150k per (working) day, some 250 working days in a year, that means within two years time the complete ISP subscriber base has been warned three times and has been reported to the courts for further action.
So by the end of 2012, the complete French economy comes to a halt. The court system is fully overloaded, an dall ISPs are filing for bankruptcy for lack of any subscribers.
Now that would be fun.
Which they themselves would, of course, scrupulously obey. No democratic government would ever spy on its own citizens. That would violate "human rights" and no politican would ever do that. Unless, of course, it is for your own good. And the government always knows what is best for you, so it's ok.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
and the ISP in question is FREE.FR
I think it's worth mentioning their name as they regularly stand out to defend such causes. The competition is mostly owned by music/media lobbies therefore they mostly do what they're told.
It goes further. The person from the government who was first in charge of HADOPI has been forced into the biggest French ISP administration (Orange/France Telecom - a previously state owned company), to make them, sorry, force them to accept and play nice with HADOPI.
That's how far the corruption goes. Note that this person thinks OpenOffice is a firewall solution, just as a funny bonus.
I wonder whether they will be able to distinguish between IP addresses that are used to provide internet access for people and spoofed IP addresses that are assigned to servers that are used to serve things like movie websites, Copyright protection organisations and so on...
If their systems are somewhat automated it might even be possible to spoof HADOPI into sending themselves a nastygram...
150k IPs a day does not mean they'll have 150k new IP each day. I'd rather bet it's the same old IPs from download going from one day to another (hey, those divx are HUGE ;-) ).
Besides, not everyone goes emule or p2p. So, they won't have everyone listed.
Just 2 more things to tell about it :
1) The main effect of this is that everyone wanting to keep on with their illegal activities will jump on the foreing VPN provider. That will cost them, but "hey, now i'm paying 10 bucks a month, i'll have no remorse downloading tons of those illegal material". i'd rather say it'll give money to those private provider and finally tears people that were buying to the cartels from time to time (for the price of a spotify account, i can now have films, music and warez, without being annoyed...)
2) Every other ISP in France offer a free bandwidth sharing for the people within the same ISP circle. I.e. say i'm a ISP A client, i can connect to wifi hotspots everywhere ISP A has a client with a box up and running. Point is : who is to know it was me or somebody in the street using my internet access ? (but maybe this is biaised and ISP have a mean to know)
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And just about every court in the world recognises that it's extremely hard to prove a negative. That's what I'm waiting for - the court's interpretation of the first few real life cases where a denial is officially lodged. The problem is that EU law trumps French law (absolutely, completely, 100%) and EU legislation is pretty hot on things like not requiring people to prove they *DIDN'T* do things.
Fining someone in such an environment is really tricky, because you're basically putting undue burden on them to prove their innocence (which is a much simpler set of laws to interpret and can still basically trump shit like this). Every law that passes is not valid in all its points until it's been tested multiple times in multiple courts.
It could easily be equated, in a court, to someone being fined for not locking their house, which allowed other people to walk in and use their house as a brothel / drug factory / playing loud music etc... Yes, they should protect their property, but can't be held liable for a third-party's actions unless you can prove that they were aware of what was going on, or involved in it. EU law, especially some quite basic human rights legislation, trumps this "law" into the ground and France can be forced to rescind it. The UK has been forced to rescind and modify laws that did similar things because they clashed with EU interpretations of similar laws.
Obviously spoken by someone who doesn't really know that much about France.
I lived for six years in France, and there is one main difference in politics between the French and Americans. When we talk about the government, we use the pronoun 'they': they can't do this, if they raise taxes, etc. For the the French, the government is 'we'. (Cue bad French jokes). I don't know why we do it [some stupid policy]. We need to do something about retirement ages.
It seems small, and so you might discount it, but this little difference is key to understanding the French. They are disgusted when voter turnout was an amazingly low (for them) 88% in the last election. We as Americans are happy if we get 50%. They've rewritten their constitution five times because they felt the situation had changed and it needed to be updated.
And as to the riots just being a national sport, that's not true. In 2006, the conservative right wing government tried to introduce a special employment contract that discriminated against the young. (Values of the French republic: Liberty. Equality. Brotherhood.) The youth held strikes, and rioted. They barricaded schools, held rallys, etc. A month later the discriminatory contract was removed from law.
As a nation, we haven't had that much national will since the civil rights movement. (Unless you count the national racism that whipped us into a fervor to support George Bush and his plans in Afghanistan^H^H^H Iraq.)
you come up accusing someone, saying they 'stole' your property, but, you dont need to prove it. accusation is enough. the burden of proof, doesnt lie on the shoulders of the accuser as it should. it lies on the shoulders of the accused. not only that, but the accuser can come up accusing with its OWN records, with no verifiable proof that those records are genuine.
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Of course, there'd need to be a signup for the account to access them, with triple password secure login, and to keep it secure, the login would only be valid for a single ip's data.
So the process would be:
That would be the process to collect each ip's details.
Of course, a written request for each ip would also be required.
If they don't like the process then they could be mailed.
Each ip's details individually mailed again, of course, CoD.
And to ensure they're protected, they would have to be first class registered mail signature required.
I mean sure, if you legally have to provide them, fine, but you still need to ensure the security of the information.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
But it was proven by someone else to be you. Your connection, which you are responsible for, accessed illegal content. That's "proof" even if just circumstantial, that you did it. They most certainly are not proceeding without proof. You may not like it. You may think it flawed, but they are most certainly not doing without any proof at all.
It could easily be equated, in a court, to someone being fined for not locking their house, which allowed other people to walk in and use their house as a brothel / drug factory / playing loud music etc... Yes, they should protect their property, but can't be held liable for a third-party's actions unless you can prove that they were aware of what was going on, or involved in it.
Again, you are arguing law from common sense. They two are not related (in fact, some may assert they are opposites). If you are negligent, you can be held responsible. In most places in the US, it's illegal to leave your car running with the keys in it (running without the keys, like remote starts are usually legal). Why? Because it makes theft easy, and the cops don't want to waste time investigating your negligence. Go ahead, look it up for where you are, or let me know where you are and I'll try. If it's illegal to leave your car running with the keys in it, then there is an analogue already in place, like your home example, that really does blame the victim, as these laws against your IP. You may not like it, but you can't argue it to be inconsistent if there is already a similar law on the books.
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