French anti-piracy bill passes

[Mindgames]

After a lot of fighting, the bill to impose harsher penalties on file-sharers in France has passed - now it just needs the Presidential signature.

Full story on Billboard

The controversial bit is that court tribunals can impose a fine or ban a user from having access to the Internet for up to 12 months, without the user offering a defense. The word of the rights holder, plus logs from the ISP, are all the court needs to find them guilty in their absence.

Opposition groups claim it's not fair (as above) and that depriving someone of Internet access in today's web-centric society is against their human rights, as so much of daily life requires it.

What do you think? Is being forced back to the 1970s appropriate punishment for someone, even if they're guilty?

[Raza]

There's nothing to be guilty of. Intellectual Property is a horrible mess of un-ethics that stagnates personal and global human development in order to reduce a naturally un-ownable thing to a format suited for commercial exploitation.

Only good thing about these laws is that they're never going to work.

[ForrestBlack]

I feel it would be more reasonable to bar proven hosts or distributors of stolen content from the internet than it is to bar alleged down-loaders. There is simply too much room for abuse of authority there.

That's like banning someone who was seen carrying a knock-off Gucci bag from shopping in the mall.

[Mindgames]

Agree with Raza that it'll be hard to enforce (DSL cut off = walk to the local Internet cafe), but there's a precedent even in the US where some parolees are "banned" from owning computers. The logic is that if you break the rules, you go to jail and share a cell with a lonely biker called Bubba, but the chances are you'll only get caught if you stick a PC on your kitchen table and invite your PO round for waffles.

The UK's trying to bring in a similar idea, but the ISPs are refusing to support it as they say they can't be responsible for who's on the end of the cable, only where it is. They want to work by disconnecting P2P servers rather than people, as it's more difficult for them dip into random hotspots and cafes - the counter-argument is that it's the person breaking the law, not the machinery (akin to putting the gun in prison and letting the shooter go home).

The sticking point IMO is always going to be jurisdictional - the downloaders are in your country, the seeders and trackers are in Zxchequania, and law is aimed at the people who can be made to follow it.

[Morning Glory]

Why is there no law governing International Waters, on the basis that it is a territory that belongs to no individual country and jurisdiction, but there are laws for the internet which is a far less tangible space?

That doesn't make any sense to me.

Could I download and share files on a boat in the middle of the ocean? Would that be OK?

[Raza]

Why is there no law governing International Waters, on the basis that it is a territory that belongs to no individual country and jurisdiction, but there are laws for the internet which is a far less tangible space?

That doesn't make any sense to me.

Could I download and share files on a boat in the middle of the ocean? Would that be OK?

Yup. In fact, some time ago the Pirate Bay claimed to have bid on a nationality-less island somewhere in the middle of oceanic nowhere that was up for auction, in order to host their site in something akin to their own personal nation-state.

Never happened, of course, but it woulda been wicked. It's on my own upper to-do list to liberate the internet by hosting all the good stuff from autonomous territory.

[Mindgames]

It's also why "pirate radio" is so called - Radio Mercur set up on a ship moored outside Danish territorial waters back in 1958, and later Radio Caroline in the UK flew the flag as a joke.

The problem is that there's no way to do it with data - for radio it's the act of transmission that was illegal, and receiving it was not. With data, both are.

Also, there's no place with cabled Web access in international waters, and if you used sat links to feed your data it would be the sat company who got prosecuted as they will have ground stations within national territory where the data is "imported". You could try and set up the mother of all Wifi hotspots, but the reach would be pitiful - people would have to row out to you before they could download anything.

[Cafe_Post_Mortem]

I don't know the laws if France, but any time you take away liberty without due process it smacks of rotten to me. But from the article it sounds like the law gets a constitutional challenge before it goes into effect. Sounds cool on that level.

But denying internet for a year... Well if there is a conviction and a likelihood of reoffending, it seems like... no it still seems like a bad idea.

The internet is a pretty important part of our lives these days. Things that prevent criminals from getting work tend to lead to more crime.

Supervised and limited internet access seems reasonable, no access seems stupid.

[Mindgames]

Who's betting that in a while, we'll all need a license to access the Web - so that the State can revoke it if you've been naughty. My money's on an RFID chip embedded in your ass at birth, mainly so it's more fun to hack.

[Buster Friendly]

Unenforceable bullshit.

Stamping of feetsies is not an effective response to the fact that "intellectual property rights" are dead. Time to move on, grow up, and get over it. You will be assimilated, the dinosaurs are extinct, and didn't hang out with jesus. The technology has out paced the ability to police it.

Seriously, the only way for them to make this work, is to stop manufacturing computer chips. If the technology exists, someone will use it.