[p2p-research] Fwd: Following France's Tough Piracy Law, Piracy Rates Go Up

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante at ecobytes.net>
Date: Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 10:53 PM
Subject: Following France's Tough Piracy Law, Piracy Rates Go Up
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>


  Failblog: Following France's Tough Piracy Law, Piracy Rates Go Up

BY Kit EatonWed Mar 10, 2010

http://www.fastcompany.com/1578134/piracy-france-three-strikes-torrents-law-copyright-prevention-movies-theft


Here's one of those fabulous stats that basically explodes an argument
people thought was done and dusted: New data shows that online content
piracy has risen in France despite the nation's super-tough three-strikes
Net ban law.



France, among several controversial legal moves concerning Net technology,
has been busy enacting some draconian Web piracy laws that almost rival the
Big Brother-ish moves going on in the U.K. (which even the boss of the
country's biggest telecoms network disagrees with.) France's new "Hadopi"
law is the real monster we're talking about--it actively connects the
country's music biz through ISPs to music pirates, and penalizes repeat
offending users by severing their Net connection after three warnings.



Sounds fierce, right? May deter you from downloading that episode of How I
Met Your Mother (rather, "La Manière Dont Je Me Suis Rencontreé Avec Ta
Mère") or Mika's latest album? You may think so. Mais...Non. Those French
types are actually defying their government, as a frank telephone study of
2,000 Bretons by the University of Rennes shows. Comparing user habits
before and after the enactment of Hadopi revealed that piracy rates of all
types have risen 3%.



The manner pirates are using to acquire the illicit data has shifted
though--away from peer-to-peer sharing systems like bit torrenting, to "file
locker" systems like Megaupload or Rapidshare, or illegal file-streaming
systems which aren't explicitly covered in the Hadopi law. This sort of
piracy actually soared by some 27% after Hadopi (and probably actually more
than this, assuming survey responders were wary of admitting to it), which
demonstrates that the French public are much cannier than the legislators.
We can assume, though, that before long there'll be a legal move to fix
these loopholes.



But we're human. So you can also expect that piracy will just bubble up
elsewhere in France once this fix occurs. And that's where the real
stupidity of tough laws like Hadopi is exposed: If so many people want to
pirate content, in France and elsewhere around the World, then the system
itself (where the content providers are overly aggressive about their IP,
which they simultaneously want sold to as many suckers as possible) is
broken.



http://www.fastcompany.com/1578134/piracy-france-three-strikes-torrents-law-copyright-prevention-movies-theft






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