France acts against net pirates | Hacker News Reader

France acts against net pirates

bbc.co.uk

37 pointsjgrahamc15 comments

Sixty people disconnected after spending several million euros. Hope the deterrent effect is worth it.

Otherwise, this seems like a huge failure to me, as it had from the start.

One could also read this as:

Within the year, of the 650,000 first offenders, there is only a 6.8% recitivism rate. Further, 99.99% of those initial offenders have halted their behavoir before the third strike.

Also, a quick googling also gave me a population for France just over 65 million. Almost 1 out of every 100 people got a piracy warning in the last year. That's... pretty comprehensive.

I was expecting to agree more with the OP here, but this seems to be having either a decent deterrent effect, or the people are getting good at going underground.

You're assuming their methods of detecting copyvios are effective. I very much doubt they are, or they would have send out far more than 650k first warnings. It's ludicrous to assume only about 1 to 2% of the ~52 million French internet users pirate stuff.

Having a bad detection rate will automatically result in a low rate of recidivism, simply because you're not likely to catch the same guy twice (unless you watch him more closely). We have pretty much no idea how many of the initial offenders have halted their behavior.

Having a bad detection rate also makes it very easy to "go underground", ie. purposely avoid detection. E.g. using Rapidshare instead of Bittorrent (or the other way around, I have no idea) hardly seems very underground to me.

But yeah: Installing an infrastructure to monitor your citizens internet use and sending out letters from the government, culminating in killing access to one of the primary infrastructures of the modern world is bound to be a pretty damn good deterrent. I'm sure they'll try to make plentiful use of it in the years to come. Maybe inciting dissent (aka "public unrest", "rioting and looting") will soon come with an internet ban.

There are 650,000 people who have been sent the first warning letter.

Only 44,000 have been sent the second.

Only 60 have hit the third strike.

We can't tell from those figures alone whether they all represent people who were genuinely infringing copyright and who really aren't any more.

However, if they are even close, this will have been probably the most effective campaign to defend copyright in recent history, and it will have done it with very little actual damage to anyone, unlike say the lawsuit madness of the US or various recent DRM schemes.

Disconnected for a maximum of one month. Assuming they lose in court, on something as difficult to prove as "neglecting to secure your internet access".

Hadopi was a failure before it started. Trying to end filesharing is like going after marijuana users, it's a lost war whether you like it or not.

> Hadopi was a failure before it started.

Why? Whatever the criticisms, they seem to have a highly effective strategy.

> Trying to end filesharing is like going after marijuana users, it's a lost war whether you like it or not.

They can't guarantee to end it, any more than making anything illegal guarantees no-one will break the law anyway.

But if they can reduce it significantly, and thus provide a more credible level of protection to copyright holders, then that is still moving in the right direction. It is more in keeping with the law, which in a civilised society is usually a good thing, not least because if the law is bad then effective mass enforcement will make it necessary to fix that law instead of ignoring its flaws and having ordinary citizens risk legal sanctions by breaking it anyway.

>Why? Whatever the criticisms, they seem to have a highly effective strategy.

If by effective, you mean "which doesn't work at all". After two years and millions spent, they are about to sue 60 people, over the whole country. People have simply moved from P2P between individuals to paying shady services for streaming.

I don't see how this qualifies as a success.

Your entire argument rests on the premises that (a) it is better to have people misbehave and then sue them than to have them behave in the first place, and (b) this isn't dissuading anyone, it's just moving them to a different medium. I don't buy your theory in either case, and even if the latter is true, you're just arguing that HADOPI works when it has a target in its sights so they should be empowered to go after "shady services for streaming" as well as the P2P networks they are currently mandated to investigate.

> Assuming they lose in court

They sure can't win in court as they're not informed that they're being judged before the judgment is passed. There is no possible defense.

> on something as difficult to prove as "neglecting to secure your internet access"

If the Hadopi said they caught your IP, the evidence is given. They don't have to prove you neglected to secure your access, it's you who shall prove you didn't neglect it by installing a government-approved spyware on your Windows-only PC.

Personally, at the first warning I will get a VPN. The defense is simple.

>They sure can't win in court as they're not informed that they're being judged before the judgment is passed. There is no possible defense.

You seem to be misinformed about the process. I don't remember exactly what the final process is, but the fact is, you can always appeal the decision to have a real hearing.

>If the Hadopi said they caught your IP,

You can always say that your IP was spoofed, that you had a trojan on you machine, and so on... It's really really hard to prove that you didn't do your best to secure your line, and simply giving an IP harvested on a tracker isn't going to cut it.

There are several activists who downloaded a lot just to get caught, with the hope of going to court. They will get good lawyers to make sure they win, and then the decision will do "jurisprudence" (I don't know if a similar concept exist in American law), and that will be the end of it. Well, probably, I don't know the future :)

VPN providers must be making a nice buck from French users as we speak.

EDIT: and of course, the well-connected network-bulldog agencies tasked by the French Government with "policing" must have pocketed quite a bit of change as well.

With country after country heading down this path, VPNs are certainly going to become more important. At the same time, I'm concerned about the level of trust that one must put into using anyone's VPN service. After all, how long until these same countries go after the VPNs on a wide scale, for "aiding and abetting pirates", by refusing to hand over logs? Even if someone says they aren't keeping logs, you don't really know until a subpoena heads their way, right?

If country after country adopted this policy, VPNs would be useless. Darknets, on the other hand...

Absolutely, see the recent HideMyAss fiasco. At the same time though, they cannot shut down VPNs nor really monitor them too much -- that would create problems for businesses, and lose votes. Also, even acting at the EU level would leave out "rogue" states; I'm sure lots of ex-soviet states would love nothing better than kickstarting a specialized IT sector. We'll eventually get the internet equivalent of XIX century "free trade ports" around China.

Theoretically, all they would ever have to do is block all file sharing connections from french ip addresses right?

The pool of peers might be smaller but I assume the connections are monitored from within france.

Or use a seed box in another country.

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