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

[TheRaven64]

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

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

[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

[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.)

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

[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 :)

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.

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...