France approves new antipiracy law
French web users caught pirating movies or music could soon be thrown offline. Those illegally sharing files will face the loss of their net access thanks to a newly-created anti-piracy body granted the wide-ranging powers. The anti-piracy body comes out of a deal agreed by France’s music and movie makers and its net firms. The group who brokered the deal said the measures were intended to curb casual piracy rather than tackle large scale pirate groups. French President Nicolas Sarkozy said the deal was a “decisive moment for the future of a civilised internet”. Net firms will monitor what their customers are doing and pass on information about persistent pirates to the new independent body. Those identified will get a warning and then be threatened with either being cut off or suspended if they do not stop illegal file-sharing. The agreement between net firms, record companies, film-makers and government was drawn up by a special committee created to look at the problem of the net and cultural protection.
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. In return for agreeing to monitor net use, film-makers agreed to speed up the transfer of movies to DVD and music firms pledged to support DRM-free tracks on music stores. The deal was hailed by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), which represents the global interests of the music business. Things are getting more serious in these days…
Source: BBC
Have fun monitoring all those people. Valuable use of resources right there.
Yeah, they are cutting everybody off big time nowdays! Money talks, I guess.
Thats stupid!!! Stoping users from downloading files, but letting millions of chinese pirate dvd’s to be sold does not seem to be near the best solution.
Go after the big guys, and let people leave their lives.
Yet another scare tactic. It’ll be interesting to see how France manages to monitor all those people and then after they notice something how long it takes to figure out whether the file was illegal or not. If these people are going to do the whole “piracy is destroying our world” bit they should at least use tools that may actually work.
use proxy
Thats unfair!! Let the nation decide if they want to pay for movies/music or not. Why is it possible that major studios like WB or Fox can decide for a howl nation? If you do nothing the will get even richer!!
Poor frenchies. hopefully this wont spread too much, but there is no way they can take that amount of people downloading without spending a fortune of the state money, aswell as wasting man power just to take some casual downloaders, its laughable really, but goodluck to French people, dont give up!
yawn… laws have no effect.
We don’t care.
We Stay strong and unite and it will never happen on here.
World have other things to worry about.
France once again ,shut up.
Let’s keep releaselog alive.
bigbuyerlost@yahoo.com
I’m french and i think it’s a good law. Piracy must be restricted to people who can “handle” it. Remember the moto from known groups : “If you like this game, Buy it”.
another drug war
it should be able to ban France (and germany) anyway
Fr & Germany are the 2 biggest reasons all things gets delayed to the EU for everything,
till they had the time to translate (or lipsync) it…
now that crappy President has another reason to dictate what the citizens are allowed to see
We all know Sarkozy is a Fu@#%&%g scorned nazi.
Nothing new here, he’s scaring all the citizen, because he knows his wife cheated on him with many of them.
film-makers agreed to speed up the transfer of movies to DVD.
Look on the bright side. If this happens, it’s goodbye R5, Hallo french R2.
I wonder when companies will realize that the reason they are downloading(or “stealing”) their products is because it’s simply put not worth 20€ to buy a movie you’ll watch once. Now I’m sure somebody will reply and claim that they need to ask that much for the companies to stay in business, but truth to be told is that even if movies were sold for 30% of the price the companies would still make profit - yes not the 200-300% profit they are used to now but still profit. On top of that they would also get more copies sold, which in turn would generate more money for the copying company for example or stores etc. which means a stronger economy.
But chances of anybody except pirates realize this is small, so meh. I’ll just keep download.
Another way I just realized as I posted this to counter piracy would be for the companies themself to host trackers with the latest movies and charge reasonable fee’s for GOOD quality and great speed. Or even better, offer the movies free - but have ads, sort of like TV series. This would make the page basically pay for itself.
how sad and embarrassing to be french
the country which pays tribute to al quaieda so they won’t attack them, the country where the main manufacturing industry is white flags
thank god there are people like the pirate bay in sweden
it is already easy for any filesharer who decides he does not want to share with france. using azureus with the country plug in and the ‘kick and ban’ right click option, you can permanently ban any ip address in france. you will see the flags when you look at the peers in the swarm. azureus will ‘remember’ these ip addresses so you don’t have to ban them twice.
eventually your computer can be frog free
of course you can do this for any country. and by eliminating certain countries with notoriously slow upload capacity [australia] you can actually speed up your torrents vastly
how sad and embarrassing that the internet gives a mouthpiece to idiots like aydin..
shame a right click kick & ban doesn’t work on clowns like that..
“We all know Sarkozy is a Fu@#%&%g scorned nazi.
Nothing new here, he’s scaring all the citizen, because he knows his wife cheated on him with many of them.”
Never seen such a stupid comments like that. Must be an american guy…
I’m from France and I just read that article…sh1t…
that sucks.
Id really like to know how they determine who is ‘illegally’ downloading, its insane task to go after so many people and its practically pretty much impossible to keep track on all of the pirates, even in 1 country
I think it’s the beginning of the end.It’s actually not so complicated for mass analyzing who downloads what for the isp’s.And for once they don’t come with absurd punishments like jail or not payable fees but a very simple solution.Cut the line.Will be very effective.Of course this will probably only be the case in western countries,I believe.I don’t see this happening in Russia or Asia.
Cheers
ok but why go after people that download and not the source. i mean dont get me wrong i like the fact that i can download any movie before it hits the shelves for free but there is only so many scene groups and millions or even billions of people downloading. i dont think thats a really well thought out plan. plus just like quincunx mentioned alot of people sell them and make money of off this so why not go after them?
lol I’m against this law but i agree on one thing..here in france piracy is a rampant disease…
it’s a rampant disease because not a lot of people here can afford to buy the overpriced DVD or CD movie/music industry sell because there’s no job and when you got one it’s so not well paid you can barely buy food for a whole month once you paid all the rents and stuff.. the country is nearly bankrupt(thanks to Chirac).
we even have a Gb/tax on storage media(blank DVD/CD, HDD! and other flash medias) and another one when you go poop and listen music at the same time.. I’m joking about the last one tho it must around the corner for sure…
French wanted Sarkozy, they got him.
Interesting that government thinks that can deny access to the internet when it has become so integrated into society. That would be thrown out by most courts. You can’t deny rights for trivial things like downloading a movie.
People should remember government isn’t a separate entity, it is a construct of the people. If people don’t want it, it goes.
The other concern is monitoring communications. This opens a bunch of questions. I doubt ISPs want the liability concerns. AND you can’t say they are not liable by law because it opens to big a door.
Movies music etc. have to adopt to technology or die by fire.
FREE THE WEB !
always resist….
Lerat
surprise! some ppl in france think that, too.
STOP BUYING ORIGINAL THINGS AND DONT GO TO THE MOVIES STOP FASCISM
He’s not a nazi but he’s an “ass” for sure. In fact he’s a “Chirac” Hihihi
Plus I don’t think the law passed the National Assembly yet and it usually takes quite some time before it does.
The French are always a little different.
Sounds scary, but the reality is that this is impossible to do. As soon as this law hits the streets (which will take a while I think) all kinds of people involved in justice will jump on it and find loopholes (the benefit of lawyers) so people won’t actually be disconnected. Furthermore, how are they going to monitor all those people? And how about European laws on privacy? No, this is never going to work.
Hi… Here is another french guy who speaks.
Just a question, why americans are still so angry with France for writing so stupids comments above ?
Ones the government will understand that they need to reduce the price of CDs and DVDs (and stop feeding at the same time the majors, who earn more on a cd than the proper artist… Long live to the independants labels !) and above all, increase the salary of french people. The cost of life increase so much since the euro money, but incomes didn’t change !
They also need to re-think about the way to distribute legal music on internet, and stop these stupids DRM destined for failure anyway. Who wants to pay the same price as a normal cd for a WMA bad encoding’s album full of DRM ?
You have right on one point guys… Our president is rubbish. French nation wanted him (I didn’t by the way), but now, we’re going to suffer the consequences ! And not only with this “anti-piracy” law unfortunately…
Yeah, you can usually spot’em online by their use of “ou” instead of “oo” or “hihihi” instead of “teehee” like in the above case.
Being Swiss, I’m glad I only live next to France and not in France itself. Not only does their social security suck ass, huge chunks of their workforce go on strikes whenever they don’t feel like working, but now they have to deal with firmer anti-piracy laws.
“decisive moment for the future of a civilised internet” what a pathetic lie
The French government is fecked.
Giiizmo, are you always such a nice person?
I bet you are…
yeah I bet you love living next to France giizmo..
must make a nice change to be able to cross the border to a country with culture, good food, good wine, people who talk at normal speed & with proper accents, where poor people are ackonwledged & which exports more than dirty money and cuckoo clocks..
@ #18 - Well said my friend.
@ #19 - Hey Larat! Don’t assume what you don’t know. Stupid, ignorant people can be found all over the world. For you, the search is as close as the nearest mirror.
I just hope that France keeps it as their own law and dont put it up for adopting as E.U law for the rest of us.
Man, I hope Sweden doesn’t get this law. Seeing how France is such a powerful member of the European Union there is a chance that they’ll force this law down our throats.
In similar news.. Have you guys heard that the Demonoid tracker is down? Apparently the CRIA (Canadian RIIA I guess) has shut the poor them down.
Hmmm… which over-rides? French laws or Euro laws? If the Pirate Party gets an in at the next Euro election, and broker enough deals with other parties, could they possibly get something through that completely denies this law? VERY long shot, but an interesting theory to explore.
only thing remotely french i care about:
DAFT PUNK OWOOO!!!1
It doesn’t take much to understand how this would be “monitored” .. we are seeing this with comcast and others now.
People download a TON of data .. they are basically going to average off and say on any given month joe user is allowed X amount of data .. some legit downloads, web surfing etc .. anything above is likely flagged and send to this monitoring group. Now I question now this would work against people who utilize FTP/IRC/Usenet .. so say I download 20gb a month off usenet .. my provider is not obligated to provide what I download. I can see the coming end of P2P / Torrent but the normal “scene” is not going anywhere unless they decide to shut off the internet
This doesn’t surpirse me, French culture is to bend over and please.
did i read this correctly? government just sold their citizens to a private corporation?
attack the casual downloader, treat everyone as a potential criminal anytime they log on the internet, and force anyone who wants a cheap/free movie to pay for it with untaxed money….there are so many fundamental flaws in that logic that it is beyond contempt - introducing laws like that should be a crime
Ya, it’s like the US’ health care system, I wonder if this will work the same way.
simply disgusting. I predict a rise in encryption & anonymity small business startups to compensate
I have one thing to say
CHEESE EATING SURRENDER MONKEY’S!
love it.
more Right Wing foxes making the security rules at the hen house.
the citizens have and continue to subsidize the network infrastructure the major telcos built
we have paid for these lines several times over, in the 40s we paid for the phone lines, the 50s we paid for switching stations, 60s were the launch of space begging ( and forked over we did), 70s brought us cable trenches dug along our streets, in the 80s we paid for the cell phone towers, in the 90s we paid for the trenches we bought in the 70s when we upgraydded to fiber optics…..
did i mention how much we have all spent underwriting the laboratories in the universities that dream the stuff up?
now the isp is charging me 50$ a month to grant me access to this wonderful system i have already paid for 10 times through taxes
part of their new cash grab pitch is the wonderful speed i can access this amazing new content available online
content many of the majors ALSO PROVIDE FREE WITH SUBSCRIPTION on other media platforms they offer. (infrastructure i also helped pay for)
MANDATORY MEDIA is the only way forward imho
if the riaa,the miaa and all the property rights groups think they have the technology to monitor their content then they should open up the gates and hit up the isps for royalties
all the major warez catagories
how many of us would go through the hassle of fake torrents, crap vid quality, and slow transfer speeds if you knew you could get from the source AND the source would get PAID.
How much of the thousand dollar cost of photoshop is based on the company recouping from its customers its losses from pirates vs the actual cost of development?
And lets say it does cost that much to develop, wouldn’t those costs be substantially spread out if Adobe could get 25 cents a dl from the isp?
Justin Timberlake is ALREADY paying some well paid shmuck to follow up on radio and tv royalties in every jurisdiction possible.
SOCAN in Canada mandates radio stations keep logs of every song played, every jingle used, and makes those logs available so Justins royalty collector knows how big to ask the amount on the check to be.
Radio stations pay a % of REVENUE to the rights association to play whatever song it wants, so it is up to Justin to follow up himself to find out who is playing what.
The net makes all of this MUCH easier.
Instead i am currently being asked to believe the following….
I am a thief because i am using my internet connection to steal music and deny the artists and manufacturer money they are entitled to.
i am paying the $50 monthly connection fee for infrastructure construction and maintenance, and for a comprehensive customer service package (don’t laugh)
i am also to believe that $ 0.99 a song is a fair market price for a song i want to listen to and for that price my options once purchased are limited to the whims of the content producer.
OK
but in the first part, what do the artist and manufacturer say we as the customer should do to compensate all of the retail, and related distribution employees now cut out of the equation.
I’m currently using a laptop which licenses its generic components from Sony, the burner is made buy sony, the blank media i used is either sony brand name or sony noname, and even if it is sony brand name blank CD, in Canada Sony gets a tax kick back for every cd i buy.
So, considering that for me to get my Sony music content sony no longer has to actually make the cd, or ship it to a store which will then need to be staffed to sell it to me…..
and considering sony IS getting money from me for the blank media, the technology to reproduce the content, and a piece just in case i didn’t pay the $.99 even though i DID….
How exactly is $15 dollars for 15 songs a fair market price considering thats what it used to cost me before i had to pay sony so much money for the ability to shop from home.
Now we are to believe the content providers have struck a deal with the isps that allow them to keep ripping us off while the isps pay nothing in return for looking the other way.
Now that I believe.
first theres a post that the rcmp wont charge people who download material. then the FRENCHIES say were gonna charge you for it. hahahahaha GO CANADA!!!!!!!!!!! YEAH! EH?
@51 buy a big mac meal and then go back and tell them you paid more than you felt you should have, and you would like everything free. <<< Pretty stupid eh?
http://www.euro2day.gr/articlesfna/48871702/
To put in place the new enforcement body, the government would have to introduce legislation amending copyright, data protection, telecommunications and consumer protection laws, with a vote in parliament as soon as spring 2008.
ΠΗΓΗ: FT.com
Copyright The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved.
sorry folks—but this above is the real news—about that subject
so there is a lot of overeaction and illetarate comments up to now
http://music.listings.ebay.com/_W0QQ_trksidZm37QQfromZR40QQsacatZ11233QQsocmdZListingItemList
Why isn’t the riaa sending out thousands of pull requests to EBAY
that link is to a major US corporation PROFITING off copyright infringement
why was the tvlinks.co.uk guy ARRESTED instead of the Google CEO, or the Stage6 owners who actually host the copyright material?
the people stealing from us are using the ill gotten gains to tell us we are the thieves and should be condemned
you have no idea about australia aydin or the state of our upload capacity. why dont you go over to the corner and be quite again.
french pirates are all waving there white flags and surrendering as i type
I’am from smal country, caled Serbia.We r on front of “war’s” from ancient time.We, or some of “we” dont like globalism and don’t like LAW who put’s (some one caled:”big guys”) criminal-politician on place that noone can’t reach him…And they made profit, simple people can’t afford legit game or piece of software…they made law like that, so they can rich him self.That’s in my county.
I don’t wonder if some-like law show on one morning in here…
BUT I DNONT PLANING STOP.
LONG LIVE RSLOG AND ALL GRUPS!
hmm….just how exactly are they gonna function when WiMAX and 3G becomes fully operational??
AFAIK, u cant really ban access to cell fones right?? (for 3g)
@59
Stage6 is allowed to get away with it as long as they take down the flagged videos. Which happens a lot. About two months ago there was a mass takedown, which resulted in 45,000 videos removed… And they also use a hash-check system to make sure the same video isn’t uploaded multiple times.
They can’t monitor everything, you know.
My friend just recieved a letter from Codemasters solicitors!!
They tracked his IP address on july 31st downloading XBOX 360 Colin mcrae Dirt using BitComet.
He has to pay £543 compensation for losses to Codemasters! and promise not to file share again or it will go to court!
I thought ISP could not give out your details to people??
Be warned they are watching you!!
I´ll guess that Darknet will get a whole bunch of new users, who unfurtunaly will help the spreading of childporn.
souds lika a victory for pedofials rather than the fimindusty.
What pain Bush is to America, Sarkozy will be to France.
He is a right winged populist and big hater.
Since France has put on the scarepants a while ago they voted for the president they deserve.
Also any french ISP can stop putting money into faster networks. Bye bye evolution!
Marre de ses lois sur le piratage !!!!
Notre president Sarkozi est un bouffon !!!
D autres pays et ou Nation pirate 100 fois que la France, c est tout s
implement les riches qui demandent encore plus d argent !!!
Vive RSLog
just watch in the next 50 years we will all be poor while 1% of the world will have all the money and then they will complain when we don’t want to work for nothing so they will force us and then will we go to war and all die
that is where our leaders are leading us with these laws
“Piracy” for life!
@61 In the States, entrapment and torrent monitoring is pretty common. The studio, game maker, whoever, plants a torrent (or picks a torrent to monitor), you download it, they note your ip and notify your isp of a copyright infringement. Then, your isp sends you a notice that says don’t do it anymore or your service will be suspended. I know from experience that this is already in place in the States. I’ve never been charged or fined, though.
I don’t know the law well enough to say if your isp is required to release your personal info or if the studio needs a court order to get it first.
It sounds like the French version is more oppressive in that the isp will play big brother for the entertainment industry.