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France leads the way in common sense
Author: Richard SwinburnePublished: 26th November 2007
Sharing media files illegally will simply get your internet access removed in France, rather than a huge fine from these guys.
From the BBC: Denis Olivennes, head of the French chain store FNAC, who chaired the committee said current penalties for piracy - large fines and years in jail - were "totally disproportionate" for those young people who do file-share illegally.
As great as this sounds, it also means that the new law will allow Internet service provides to quietly nose traffic being sent and received by customers and forward persistent offenders to an independent watchdog that confirms the informations and passes the details onto the fuzz.
The enterprising among you will already have deciphered ways around this, such as certain types of encryption, but it does mean that the laymen is more likely to get caught if ISPs are now sniffing the packets that directly pass under their noses. We know that simply banning file sharing doesn't work as there are plenty of legitimate uses for it and no doubt privacy advocates will be along shortly to voice concern about the invasion of our data.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is behind the law, of which, part of it is to bring Movies to DVD faster and to encourage DRM-free music to be more widely available.
So is this a good thing - the punishment finally mirrors the crime committed, rather than having the four letter MAFIAA suing everyone randomly for big numbers, or is it just another erosion of complete online privacy at the expense of law enforcement for a few content producers? What about if you "borrow" a neighbour's WiFi connection - is wireless encryption now a legality? Or what about free hotspots? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
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Comments (24)
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How's the snooping going to work, anyway? It'll have to be automated, and who's going to make sure that no false positives get reported? Or, as Bindi said in the article, that it is actually the owner of the line who's doing the sharing?
Sounds good in principle, I don't think it'll work in practice.
Since ISPs will be inpecting the traffic, might as well clean all spammers and virus from it.
Also, the law also specifies that DRM ends and all movies must be released in DVD six months after the opening day in theatres.
I don't know if anyone'll be able to read that and make heads or tails of it, but hey. I'm open to questions :B
The first question for me is what traffic can / will they monitor? There are a few very valid, non-invasive uses for such statistics and a few nefarious uses for the same data. The most important question for me is who all gets to use that data and for what purpose(s) - and who will be denied access?
And us in the UK should be able to order goods from france, so finally, the UK isnt completly boned
In the way of monitoring:
i guess they [ISPs] would just monitor the amount a person downloads and then start logging what they do.
yeah, French dubbed movies..... and of course you also want to consider that lots of stuff are more expensive around Europe than in the UK, there is stuff in the UK that costs 3/4 what it costs here and in the US there is stuff that costs 1/2 the price...... i really hate the euro and what it has done to the buying power of us Portuguese.....
sorry for the rant
/rant
on French i only have the next to say.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57vRmR5a39s&feature=related
"we surrender!!!!!!!" :D
Next we might as well say everyone should be fitted with a tracker so if your near a crime scene you can be identified and well what after that? I'm not saying big brother here far from it what im saying is what about your data? your details? do you really want someone who has the control to do what they like with your connection snooping about your personal traffic? Perhaps reading emails? Looking at sites youve visited? People you talk too? Perhaps even looking at encrypted data to see what youve been doing? Then where does it stop exactly?
I'd rather have bigger penalties for file sharing than that anyday.
The government already monitors most traffic in/out of the county, and most ISP's do too - how do you think they catch child pornography?
No we haven't. You're naive if you don't think your data is snooped through by people in ISPs. The only protection your email has from unscrupulous eyes is the massive swathes of spam that surround it. You are just hiring a service from your ISP to route your messages to other computers around the world. There's no obligation of privacy for ISPs any more than their would be if you sent messages in the post without an envelope.
And incrotchment
I think this could be a step in the right direction, if a little misguided.
Pretty sure the law sees it as Your Line, Your Responsibility. (e.g. your responsible for whos on your network )
Problem with that approach is it would see the ISP's liable for every transaction on their network bet it kiddy pron, movie downloads or spamming. They are not going to go along with that with draconian restrictions on the user.
I wouldnt have thought the same rule would apply to the service provider.
Whats good for the goose and all that. You can't have a law you expect private citizen to abide by but have different rules for big business.