Three Men On a Boat

In France a bill has been tabled to combat copyright infringement by way of illegal downloads by pirates of material that is held under copyright. France has been one of the few countries that has generally allowed downloading to go almost unchecked but this bill has a three strikes system. The first is an email warning, then a postal warning followed by a suspension from the use of Internet services for a period of time.
This has come with a lot of opposition from rights activists including members of the European Parliament have protested this measure on the grounds of it being called highly repressive and far reaching. The main sticking points have been the face that the person who owns the Internet link is the one who is going to be penalised and the cost to policing this.
What this essentially means is that if one’s smart aleck neighbour were to hack into a link they could download illegal content and they would not be in trouble for it. The person who owns the link would then suffer for this. And given that nowadays in France, the internet, phone and tv are connected when it comes to your communication this will mean a blackout. Beyond that what we will have is a very real Big Brother situation where there is a direct control over how people behave instead of adapting to it.
Then when it comes to policing it the whole thing, the Internet Service Providers will have to fork out ten million euros to have the systems in place. What are the implications here? The bill doesn’t seem to ask that question. What happens when you have that sort of access to how a person behaves on the net? And what does it mean for costs that will be passed to the user because of copyright infringement which might not even be an interest significant section of the population. With the government planning to cut a number of users per day this could result in very significant losses for service providers as well.
The reality is that instead of adapting to the behavioural cycles of human beings the entertainment industry finds itself out of step. For example people like to watch things on dvd as soon as possible and having to wait six months - in some cases even more – is just not a good system.

In point of fact the entertainment industry is not trying to catch users where they are looking. Instead of adapting they want to limit access which defeats the purpose of copyright. Copyright after all was meant to assign from the state a monopoly over work by a creator for a period of time.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe in illegal download but up to a certain point. I think a lot of money is going to be used to fight technology when that money could be used to find ways of working with it.

So the threat is there. The threat to the way you live. If the entertainment industry had it their way, we would all be using vinyl and watching movies on prehistoric technology.

The coffee is stinking the whole place. They just don’t want to smell it.

Labels: france copyright law