

France acts against net pirates - jgrahamc
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15198093

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ovi256
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.

~~~
pflats
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.

~~~
morsch
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.

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joelthelion
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.

~~~
gorog
> 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.

~~~
joelthelion
>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 :)

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toyg
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.

~~~
noarchy
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?

~~~
toyg
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.

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gerggerg
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.

