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."

Comments

Carte blanche

[fastest fascist]

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.

Re:Carte blanche

[Pikoro]

In order to fix this, or at least slow it down, the copyright holders should have to pay a fixed amount per IP to offset the cost of the request for the ISP. Let's see them request 150,000 IPs per day when it cost 100 Euros per IP.

Re:Carte blanche

[Thanshin]

Well, at least they started in France.

You may think otherwise but fucking with the general public in France is not a good idea. First cars start to combust spontaneously. Then it's buildings. Before you have time to react, people are having their head separated from the rest of their body.

Re:Carte blanche

[TheRaven64]

I, for one, vote for Citizen Robespierre as government liaison to the RIAA.

Re:Carte blanche

[captainpanic]

Well, at least they started in France.

You may think otherwise but fucking with the general public in France is not a good idea. First cars start to combust spontaneously. Then it's buildings. Before you have time to react, people are having their head separated from the rest of their body.

Partially true.
But it's the unions which are strong and actually accomplish something. The unions organize the enormous strikes to protect the rights of the workers.

Those riots where cars get burned are no more than a national sport. They do not accomplish much (some awareness of problems at best). The real French revolution was 221 years ago.

The future will be the most interesting. A kid downloads illegal content... and daddy the freelance software engineer gets shut down. That would be one of the first lawsuits. And I seriously doubt that it will come to riots and strikes. More likely that people will find a technical workaround.

Re:Carte blanche

[John Hasler]

No, no, no. That could never happen in Europe. European governments have infinite respect for privacy.

Re:Carte blanche

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to fix this, or at least slow it down, the copyright holders should have to pay a fixed amount per IP to offset the cost of the request for the ISP. Let's see them request 150,000 IPs per day when it cost 100 Euros per IP.

That's what some of the ISP are asking for, that the government or the copyright holders compensate them for the cost of the identifications. They only got back a big fat "no way" so far. So, currently, ISP have to comply under 8 days, at their own cost, or pay a fine.

Likely the whole system will soon be automated

Yeah, well, no. The law is so well conceived that it does not specify under which form the ISP have to provide the copyright infringers identification details. So one of them, in a playful manner, sent the first batch of identification details through the mail, on some printed sheets of paper. Good luck to try automating that. :)

Re:Carte blanche

[fastest fascist]

I like your idea, though I prefer an automated telephone system for this. "Please enter your request ID now." With one phone line to cater to all copyright owners, of course.

Re:Carte blanche

[ArsenneLupin]

How difficult is it to find out the home addresses of politicians? And, if it's 150000 different IP addresses, does it have to be that many different postal addresses as well?

Re:Carte blanche

[jedidiah]

Ruin enough people's lives and you will have lots of the wrong sort of people mad at you.

This is how real revolutions begin.

Re:Carte blanche

[Robert Zenz]

Actually, most of the european governments would like to see more and stricter privacy laws (I'm not talking UK here, they're an island). The problem is in this case that the EU-Central-Government seems pretty hard influenced by lobbies of all kind. Additionally there are negotiations behind closed doors with the industry about this.

I'm not saying that the EU is something bad, hell no, I think it's the first step into the right direction. But we really should drag industry-lobbies out of the parliament and shot them in the streets.

Re:Carte blanche

[Pikoro]

One would think ROT-13'd braille would be sufficient.

Re:Carte blanche

[AHuxley]

"Likely the whole system will soon be automated."
Australia is dreaming of that too. Show ID to get an ISP account, a fed or state task force clicks on any Australian ip and the data links back in real time.
".... the AFP [Australian Federal Police] told the briefing that it wanted to automate the process of requesting and obtaining access to telecommunications data."
http://www.zdnet.com.au/inside-australia-s-data-retention-proposal-339303862.htm
France may want the same instant system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frenchelon in the courts :)

Re:Carte blanche

[AwaxSlashdot]

So basically copyright holders in France have free reign to find out who any IP address belonged to.

Technically, copyright holders don't know who the IP belongs to. They provide a list of IP to HADOPI, a state run service. HADOPI request the IDs and execute the 3 strikes process (e-mail, snail-mail, disconnection).

With such volumes of request, there's no way their validity will be questioned in any way.

Everything have been crafted that way. There are application notes from the gov discouraging the justice to run additional investigation and proceed to the disconnection solely from the "proofs" provided by copyright holders.

Likely the whole system will soon be automated.

Currently, there is one little glitch : the connection between ISP and HADOPI has not been formally defined. Gov does not want to draft it because the ISP will have the right to define the fees they'll ask to process this id request.

So one ISP sent back the identification printed on paper since the format the id should be sent is not specifically defined.

Re:Carte blanche

[captainpanic]

Innocent until proven guilty - that still stands... but governments are really trying hard to prove that we're guilty of something.

And surprise, surprise, if you look hard enough, almost everybody is guilty of something.

If such a large group of people are misbehaving, maybe there's something wrong with the laws, rather than with the people...

Re:Carte blanche

[darthflo]

Oh come on, people, please. Have a bit of imagination. Telephone systems and printed CAPTCHAS? This is the precise situation interpretive dance was invented for. Also, since this is France: mimes!

Re:Carte blanche

[kangsterizer]

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.

Re:Carte blanche

[Krneki]

Hey hey, slow down Johnny boy.
This is not how democracy works. The big corporations, using corrupted politicians, create new laws that will never ever benefit the working class. Now in return the working class has to pay through taxes or higher internet fees all the new expenses that comes with this new type of regulation.

And while the ISP is working his ass of to respect the new laws, a couple more legislation comes in order to track more user activities online, after all they are already monitoring what we are doing and if we didn't give a fuck the first time, why should we care later?

P.S: Have a nice day.

Re:Carte blanche

[mlts]

What happens in France with this bill will echo throughout the world. If it is successful, politicians in the US and UK will follow suit and start allowing entities who have no law enforcement duties to be able to demand millions of names daily from ISPs.

Of course, a conviction in a criminal case or a finding of guilt in a civil case would be a rubber stamp by a judge -- Plaintiff says "ISP said this is who it is, this evidence cannot be faked" Judge drops the gavel and moves to the next case.

Then we will find that abuses have started happening. Advertisers would have been using the mechanism to pull RL names of people who visit their websites so they can sell that information.

We will then start to see law firms performing one lawsuit (because it is easy to try) with 50,000+ defendants (think the Hurt Locker legal wrangling.) This will become commonplace as precedent sets in showing that a name popping up on the IP list is an automatic guilt finding.

Blowback? Anonymous VPN services will start to become a lot more popular when Joe Sixpack sees his friend Jim Riverhead get hounded by bill collectors daily for a multimillion judgement for downloading an album.

Re:Carte blanche

[dmayle]

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.)

Re:Carte blanche

[psycho12345]

First you have to pay someone to divert from their usual tasks to do this, or given the volume, you would need to hire a brand new person to do the lookups, possible more. 2nd the manager or some person delegated by said manager would have to sign off on them, as well as have the legal dept. sign as well. Even if its a total rubber stamp, it will still take people's time, which equals money.

Re:Carte blanche

[CurseOfTheVampire]

Also, for a bit more detail (from the same site):

In English speaking countries, we use the common law as the basis of our legal system. In its origins, the Norman French occupied England, which was largely unsettled and not at all well policed. So it became relatively easy to have someone charged with a crime, since witnesses were rare. Juries were used to decide guilt and the facts of the case because the Normans did not speak the vernacular very well. Over time, the burden of proof was placed upon the accuser, later the Crown. It has been that way in our system for nearly a eight hundred years. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law

The origins of law in France, Italy, Spain and a few other places, they follow what is called "civil law," which also includes criminal law. The historical antecedents of that system are the Code Justinian, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Juris_Civilis church law, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_law the customary law of the place, and the Code Napoleon, which was a re-codification of existing law. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_code

Under that system, it is the duty of the state to investigate crimes and to only bring charges if there is sufficient evidence to justify them. If accused, the defendant has the duty to try to show the state where it is was wrong in its investigation. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof

Re:Carte blanche

[Dashiva Dan]

No, they should make it easier for them and make them available online.
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:

1. Register to get ip details
2. wait for registration confirmation
3. log in to system
4. provide authentication of your login
5. match captcha
6. get details
7. registration gets deleted - one time use only

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.

Re:Carte blanche

[MiniMike]

What's wrong with having the info tattooed on the back of a rabid dingo, to be released in the next board meeting of the company requesting the information? Assuming they're meeting within the 8 day limit.

Typical

[Rik Sweeney]

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? The ISPs will have to hire more staff to cope with the demand. This is an excellent way to create new jobs and get people back to work and help the economy recover faster.

But no, you only look at the downside :P

Erm

[ledow]

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).

Re:Erm

[Antity-H]

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.

Re:Erm

[radish]

Here's an idea. Create a whole bunch of ~700mb video files - content is unimportant as long as you filmed it yourself. Name them things like "Aliens.mp4" and "Terminator.mp4" and add a license screen at the beginning indicating that these movies are free for anyone to distribute or copy provided they do not work for and are not associated with the major film studios or any of their agents - you're the copyright holder so you can make up whatever terms you want. Now torrent all these, wait for the enforcers to download them for verification, and hadopi their asses :)

Re:Erm

[Rogerborg]

Here's an idea: do it, rather than posting on Slashdot about it.

Re:Erm

[amentajo]

Here's an idea: do it, rather than posting on Slashdot about it.

radish may already plan on doing it, you don't know. Posting on Slashdot about it does not take away his/her ability to do so.

Re:Erm

[MacGyver2210]

Shut up. These videos take a long time to encode. Slashdot is a great way to pass the time.

Re:So what happens to IP addresses outside France?

[Xest]

They'll just target IPs or hostnames assigned to French ISPs and ditch foreign IPs, that's really all they need to do to solve that problem.

Pirate Party

[Joce640k]

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.

3.5 years until everybody in France is offline

[Eivind Eklund]

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.

Perspective

[airfoobar]

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.

Re:Perspective

[Ecuador]

Liberté, égalité, fraternité and all that bullshit are far behind them now.

You are overreacting, it's still there...

liberté - Copyright holders are free to get the IP's of everyone.
égalité - Notice "everyone" from above. Soon the entire citizen base of France will be equally harassed by copyright holders.
fraternité - Well, I am sure there will be more chance for the millions of harassed citizens to come together and share their woes in a brotherly fashion.

France, country of copyright thieves?

[Drakkenmensch]

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?

Re:France, country of copyright thieves?

[wvmarle]

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.

Re:So what happens to IP addresses outside France?

[TheRaven64]

It won't. It is trivial to find out which ISP owns a particular IP - all allocations are public. Once you've identified an IP owned by a French ISP, then you can ask them to identify the customer.

Oh, and before everyone starts being glad that this is in France so it doesn't affect them, they might like to check the open source programs on their hard drive. Most of you will find at least one project that uses bandwidth and equipment provided by free.fr.

Re:That's Everyone

[pehrs]

Okay, I will bite.

Kalle is 00:23:6c:8a:75:26
Oscar is 00:21:b7:24:52:18

Sep 22 17:04:08 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.0.74 from 00:23:6c:8a:75:26 via re0
Sep 22 17:04:09 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPACK on 192.168.0.74 to 00:23:6c:8a:75:26 via re0
Sep 22 22:29:37 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPRELEASE of 192.168.0.74 from 00:23:6c:8a:75:26 via re0 (found)
Sep 22 22:29:37 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPRELEASE of 192.168.0.74 from 00:23:6c:8a:75:26 via re0 (found)
Sep 22 22:29:37 husky dhcpd[2673]: Released lease for IP address 192.168.0.74
Sep 22 22:30:18 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPDISCOVER from 00:21:b7:24:52:18 via re0
Sep 22 22:30:18 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPOFFER on 192.168.0.74 to 00:21:b7:24:52:18 via re0
Sep 22 22:30:20 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.0.74 from 00:21:b7:24:52:18 via re0
Sep 22 22:30:20 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPACK on 192.168.0.74 to 00:21:b7:24:52:18 via re0
Sep 22 22:34:37 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPRELEASE of 192.168.0.74 from 00:21:b7:24:52:18 via re0 (found)
Sep 22 22:34:37 husky dhcpd[2673]: DHCPRELEASE of 192.168.0.74 from 00:21:b7:24:52:18 via re0 (found)
Sep 22 22:34:37 husky dhcpd[2673]: Released lease for IP address 192.168.0.74

Given this data, please tell me which user had 192.168.0.74 at Sep 22 22:30...

Finding out how the switching fabric in a large network is configured at a point in time is a non-trivial problem. To this you should add that you don't know the precision of clocks involved, nor do you know if one of your users suddenly changed their MAC address. Possible you can log MAC address-port allocation, but even this is a very crude tool, as you have to match this logging information against your DHCP logs and then make sure that nobody was cheating the system by hard configuring an IP so it wasn't handed out by DHCP (remember: dumb switches are common in the last mile!)

I don't envy anybody having to build such a system that can stand up to any scrutiny.

Re:A trivial problem

[Dan Dankleton]

For ADSL and similar services, cutting people off is generally* done by account name on the authentication server rather than IP address. Customers' IP addresses can change on a regular basis; their account name never does. Otherwise access is disabled by disabling the port which the customer connects to. It would be quite rare to disable access by blocking their IP.

* For "generally" read "always"

Media cartel don't get the ID

[AwaxSlashdot]

They provide the IP to an intermediary state run service (named HADOPI). This service requests the ID and send the warnings and ask to close the connection at the 3rd occurence.

So media cartel don't get the final user iD.

Dear French voters

[fnj]

You signed up for a filthy corrupt fascist regime. This is the shit that comes with it. Enjoy.

Re:Dear French voters

[Antisyzygy]

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.

Re:Let the show begin!

[schon]

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.

Sad

[Jaysyn]

It's sad to think that even when a country goes thru the trouble of killing all of their nobles, they just end up making new ones eventually.

Soon this law will be useless

[Delgul]

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...

Re:Soon this law will be useless

[Eunuchswear]

Yes, the laws are extremely strict here:

Current state of the law

The use of cryptography is free, according to article 30(I) of the law No. 2004-575 of 21 June 2004 for the trust in the digital economy (Loi pour la confiance dans l'économie numérique).

Source http://rechten.uvt.nl/koops/cryptolaw/cls2.htm

Don't hurt me!

[amoeba1911]

I AM A COPYRIGHT HOLDER and I AM PROUD OF IT.

In fact, we're ALL copyright holders. Anytime you draw anything you own the copyright to it. Anytime you take a photo you own the copyright. Anytime your kid draws a crayon drawing, that's more copyrighted work... you should be proud of the fact that your kid will own the exclusive rights to that crayon drawing for 75 years after he's dead. Awesome, isn't it? Anytime you whistle yourself a tune, you own the copyright to that musical performance. If it's an original tune, then you own the copyright to the musical score. Anytime you speak, you own the copyrights to the sound you produced, as well as the words you sequenced together. Anytime you write something on slashdot, you own the copyright to it too.

This however is at best a blatant and outrageous over-generalization, could be considered an offensive omission:

Copyright holders are currently in the process of sending out tens of thousands of IP-addresses of alleged infringers to Internet service providers

No, I'm not sending any IP addresses. You're not sending any IP addresses. Who are these people labeled as "copyright holders"? I know who they are, that's the "copyright mafia".

Please, properly label these a-holes who want to protect their lavish lifestyles at the expense of us all. Saying that they are copyright holders is over generalization. All humans are copyright holders. These people the article is referring to are the COPYRIGHT MAFIA. They switched their Tommy guns for lawyers; instead of protection money they collect "distribution fees" for doing something that we could do easier without them. Instead of setting example by breaking your knee caps, they set example by suing you into oblivion. They have gotten accustomed to their lavish lifestyles at the expense of everyone around them. This is a mafia operation, not innocent "copyright holders".