France: Taking anti-piracy to the next level

by
Inf

ModemScissors

France wants to step up the pace of war against piracy, by adopting a new law that will make it possible to ban users from using broadband Internet for up to a period of one year.

The new law would make use of a 3-chances policy, and after you are caught downloading illegally for 3 times, you are barred form using the Internet. As simple as that. Quite a radical measure you might say, considering that till now, people were only threatened or advised not to download illegal material off the Internet.

Now, as I said, the French authorities want to literally keep you away from the content you so much want to download, whether you like it or not. And apprently, this new law seems to receive support from the French president, Nicholas Sarkozy.

Why am I blogging about this? Just take a look at who is our main ISP is. Orange. Any bells ringing yet? No? French ISP then?

Yep! Orange is a French ISP, and if this law is actually accepted in France, and if all French ISPs are to sign it, I believe this would include Orange.

Now, I’m not really sure how this would work, but is there a risk that Mauritian Internet users will be affected too?

I don’t know. I’m no law student. But if anybody can bring any clarity to this matter, your comments are most welcome.

I wonder what would happen if somebody happened to be leeching off their neighbour’s wireless connection and downloading illegal content, and the connection owner gets caught. Who goes down? The owner or the leecher?

I personally think these “repressive” ways will not end piracy. Waging war on your own customers is never great. In my opinion, offering better content, more content at affordable prices would really tempt customers away from illegal downloading. If only “download all you can” for a reasonable price ($10/month?) existed, it would be real bliss.
Cheap prices, availability of extra content and services and total freedom. I believe this would be what an average customer like me would ask for. Not much huh?

Your views?

(Original source)

{democracy:4}

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  • Guru

    Since the very beginning of the rebranding I feared something like this. Mauritians use bittorrent massively, think about our friend Faris. We are not in safe hand I believe.

  • When I heard about that radical measure pioneered by SuperSarko, I was really shocked? Is this where the Web/Internet 3.0 heading? Censorship & stifling of freedom, like in China?

    While I believe this measure will not be really applied (coz of the very powerful French NGOs), in other countries (like Mauritius), there’s no way to stop it!
    Since Orange is still MT, we are safe (but for how long?) 😐

    The Internet is becoming more confined than ever…

  • kyu

    hum… smells like trouble indeed, been a moment since France’s been taking steps in trying to “fight” piracy but the result were always, erm, clumsy and not really effective laws (which also have other nasty side effects, dadvsi anyone?)

    The fact is that
    (1) Bittorent / p2p is not only used for illegal purposes, eg. nux / bsd distros as well as updates for somme popular mmorpgs (WOW etc) are often distributed this way… would someone be checking each and every torrent on trackers to verify if its legal and who is downloading it? …

    (2) hum, sous entendu aussi, they will be monitoring the web usage then, creepy… ~_~

    (3) having used wi-fi in my cousin’s apartment in france, i can confirm it is really easy to get blazing fast speeds when squatting on neighbours connections (on the other hand my only comparison is orange Mauritius so, even 2mbps seems enormous xD) thus as mentioned, in practice i could get that neighbor’s connection shut off by simply dloading torrents on his connection? hum xD

    however, like carrot said, this probably won’t be adopted in France, because of all the NGOs. (m’enfin d’un autre cote dadvsi has been voted despite the efforts put against its adoption, so we can’t say for sure)

    In mauritius i think we are safe, for now that is, since AFAIK it was just a rebranding of MT, but only time will tell i guess

  • Guru

    I think you are mistaken. Remember Internet and Mobile communications are under the jurisdiction of Orange. So this rule may be applied.

    In fact, the rebranding made us more vulnerable. RIAA and the others can charge us with illegal downloading via p2p now.

    That is a neg point for orange in Mauritius.

  • zahid

    now mauritians will stop using bit torrent sites like azereus and utorrent.

    the only way to pass through it if a rule like this applies will be to download from filesharing sites like rapidshare…even though watever you download your isp knows about it.

    everyone knows that whenever you visit a site your ip is logged there.and sometimes you can be banned from some sites.well there are some hide ip software and i use them.

    i live in the uk and wanted to watch prison break on fox…
    but its only possible if you live in the us,by changing my ip to the us i had a nice hd prison break video..

    the thing is for p2p downloads,if you use any “hide ip”,it will hide you only from the website like pirate bay or mininova but when you start downloading your real ip is logged on the trakker and you can’t change it..

    i used to believe that we couldnot do anything until i saw a software on the web,i forgot the link but its not free…but its rather cheap.this software put you really anonymous for p2p,net,evrthing and the best part of all,they don’t keep a log of watever you downloaded.its a site from the nederlands..

    the best thing to do now is to go in cybercafe and carry your usb with you.

  • Guru

    To counter ISPs blocking your P2P connection either encrypt your protocol and don’t allow unencrypted clients to establish session with you.

    Using this approach you will be at a disadvantage if the swarm is small and none of the peers/seeds have encrypted their protocols.

    A paid service would be to use annomysation. You would be safe.

  • InF

    Encryption will not really solve anything if there are monitoring bots in the swarm you are downloading from. More so considering that anti-piracy organisations have been seeding fake files on torrent networks for a while now, and they instantly get your IP if you are downloading their fake files.

    @Zahid: Tracking sites like RS and similar entails monitoring your Internet usage, which I believe is against privacy policies in place. But! Torrent uses its own protocol which is easy to monitor. Encryption can help, but it’s not absolute safety.

    Now, for pirates, there will always be solutions. There are already private torrent networks with very restricted access. Next, there’s what people called “darknet” file sharing, where strict encryption and non-logging policies are in place. Now, we just have to see other creative measures pop up.