French ISP Refuses To Send Out Infringement Notices

An anonymous reader writes "Last month it was clear that French ISPs were not at all happy about the whole three strikes Hadopi process in France. Now that the 'notice' process has started, with Hadopi sending out notices to 10,000 people per day, it's hit a bit of a stumbling block. The French ISP named 'Free' has apparently figured out a bit of a loophole that allows it to not send out notices and protect its subscribers. Specifically, the law requires ISPs to reveal user info to Hadopi, but it does not require them to alert their users. But, the law does say that only users who are alerted by their ISP can be taken to court to be disconnected. In other words, even if Free is handing over user info, so long as it doesn't alert its users (which the law does not mandate), then those users cannot be kicked off the internet via Hadopi."

Comments

10,000 users a day...

[Anonymous Coward]

At what percentage of the population breaking a given law does the law become stupid to have around at all?

Re:10,000 users a day...

[mwvdlee]

If a majority of the population decided bank robbery was okay, does that mean we should re-evaluate if robbing banks is really a bad thing? Of course not!

If the majority decides bank robbery is okay, then you should probably investigate why and will likely have to change the way banks opperate.
And if 99% of the population likes to rob banks, then you should probably make robbing banks legal.
The world changes constantly therefore moral values change constantly. Laws should reflect the current moral values of society, not what was once decided many decades ago.

Ultimately, copying someone else's IP, to which you have no rights, means someone didn't get paid. Period.

No, it doesn't.
Many times this WILL be the truth, but you cannot honestly believe that somebody who downloads a dozen movies every week would pay for all those movies if he could not download them.
1 copy != 1 lost sale.

And if you copied it, you have assigned some value to it. Period.

Again, no. For the plain and simple logical reason that "value" is subjective. The person copying may value something at 0$, but that doesn't mean other people will value it similarly.

At best, it means you've inflicted direct financial harm by devaluing of the product in question.

No. A lower valuation does not directly relate to financial harm.

No bones about it, if you pirate IP, you absolutely are harming the IP owners.

No. The net effect may be neutral or even possitive given an increase in popularity. i.e. MS-DOS.

Either that, or *everything* published on economics is wrong.

Not "everything", merely the few highschool economics books that you've been reading.

Economics is far more complex than you describe.

Re:10,000 users a day...

[cptdondo]

I'm with you on this.

I actually tried to get permission from ASCAP et al to play music in a particular setting. Turns out that there is no way to get permission to play music publicly unless you do so professionally (as in, a DJ or a band).

There's also no way to get permission to mix your own CDs and compilations unless you do so professionally and sell at least 200 of the compilations.

Along the way, no one at ASCAP could actually explain the process for getting legal access, or provide any sort of information other than referring me to other people in the organization and in outside organizations, none of whom were able to help or would return phone calls or emails.

So this is sort of a chicken and egg problem; the music industry *could* solve a lot of piracy by offering a simple, legal access to their catalog by those who want to, but for whatever reasons they choose not to do so.

So clearly the music industry itself does not assign a significant value to entities who are not large profit centers. In light of this, I really don't understand why they are suing those very people.

I for one would pay a fee to have full, unfettered, legal access to their catalog as long as the fee was proportional to my income from that catalog, and took into account that what I do has resulted in sales of CDs and individual tracks.

they only send 100 notices this first time

[zproc]

Hadopi's required / they say they need to send 25 000 notices per day I believe, but actually send 100 for this time. Also, "Free" handed the IPs on paper instead of providing the data digitally like every other provider. And yes another provider urged the governement to act to make "Free" comply as they sensed "Free" was gaining a little bit more popularity with this trick.

Re:they only send 100 notices this first time

[Cinder6]

They should take it one step further than paper: run the user info through a CAPTCHA generator so that it can't simply be scanned. Claim something about security to justify it.

Re:Free's logic doesn't make any sense

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not refusing to relay, it's refusing to send. Hadopi doesn't want to setup an SMTP server, and asks the ISP to send the letter themself.

Free is refusing to do so because there is no compensation for the whole thing, including the identification. It cannot refuse to send the info because of the law, but to send the notification, the law REQUIRES that an agreement was made. An agreement hadopi is refusing to do.

Re:Circumvention via methods such as TOR

[zproc]

Some people here in france began using anonymous VPN connections like iPredator or Relakks.

Re:Where are the parents?

[Anonymous Coward]

If French courts are anything like courts in the rest of the world, the "spirit" of the law will apply.

You're not american I hope. The country that allows for endless copyright duration by continuously extending the deadline before anything as small as a mouse falls into public domain even though the spirit of copyright law in the US is to mandate the exact opposite of what is going on?

And why is that? Because the LETTER of the law requires a finite duration - it just doesn't care what that duration is or if it's obviously being gamed with endless extensions. (the loophole)

Re:Where are the parents?

[evilandi]

I'm guessing you've not visited France much.

Farmers and fishermen use loopholes in the law to block entire interstates or major ferry ports for weeks on end.

There is a deep and wide cultural history of using legal loopholes to embellish protest.

Re:Where are the parents?

[arivanov]

Rezt of ze world means USA and UK, no?

Most of the "rest of the world" relative to the aforementioned precedent culprits including France uses the napoleonic law system. This system mandates a strict separation of legislative, judicial and administrative powers. In that system the letter of the law is followed strictly and the courts do not go on inventive sentencing and precedent creation spree which practically replaces functions of the legislative branch. Similarly, the parliament cannot suspend, amend, correct and violate fundamental rights the way the UK does on a casual basis under the pretext that "the parliament is sovereign and cannot be bound". And so on.

The law will be returned to parliament, amended and "normal service" will resume shortly. However prior to that the courts will not "replace the pariliament" and engage in "inventive sentencing" the way they do in the UK and the USA.

It is actually more "common sense" than USA and UK because it does not feed endless litigation and appeals of anything regardless how small all the way to the supreme court. It makes the law "stick".

It's already happening

[Nicolas MONNET]

In the latest local elections, the first since that law was passed, Sarko's party got disastrous results in the younger demographics. His MPs were freaked out by this, an insider reported. Now they're not exactly the most highly voting demo, but since Sarkozy's core constituency is the 65+, and they tend to eventually die, it does not bode well for 2012.