France Tracks Down 18 Million File-Sharers
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
18 million observed instances of filesharing in supposed breach of copyright, not 18 million filesharers. Of a million lucky instances chosen at random, 90% of these led to the identification of lucky lucky account holders. Of the 900,000, 470,000 first warnings were sent out. The rest might presumably be duplicates, or based abroad, because it's hard to see why the other 430,000 IDs were not part of the email-sending exercise. they might also be libraries, internet cafs, etc.
Interestingly, it seems HADOPI really took the UN's human rights criticism of HADOPI-like measures; it recently put out a press release urging caution, transparency and legal compliance by those seeking to develop deep packet inspection technology and other filters (which it must be notified of), telling the private sector to instead focus on developing legal media offerings and experimenting with pricing (http://www.hadopi.fr/download/sites/default/files/page/pdf/C...)
And yet 18 Million file-sharers were tracked? Doesn't pass the smell test, sorry.
edit: I just checked the linked article, and it's actually talking of 18 millions infractions from an undefined number of file sharers.
Hadopi had a couple of effects:
* You know you've got 2 free warnings before you have to become careful, e.g. by subscribing to a VPN for a couple euros a day.
* Hadopi only monitors P2P; French movies and music massively migrated to megaupload et al.
* It has shown that many people are willing to pay a reasonable fee for unlimited media access, and that if majors won't take their money, then VPN and file sharing providers gladly will.
I hoped it would promote uncontrollable technologies such as darknets or F2F networks, but they've been way too inefficient to do that.
This is regular users. Occasional users and people who have tried it in the past, are both much higher figures.