French three-strikes law reducing piracy

Copyright Cheats Face the Music in France [New York Times]

France has been on a two-year crusade to end digital content piracy and recently stepped up its efforts by sending its first anti-piracy cases to court. 

A French law, commonly referred to as the three-strikes law, imposed a program for diminishing piracy that began with issuing warnings to suspected digital pirates, those sharing copyrighted content over the Internet.

Over 822,000 email warnings were sent out as "strike one" of the program. The second strikes were issued by registered mail and hit roughly 68,000 different suspects. Now 165 have received their third strike, which includes a fine of 1,500 euro and a month suspension of their connections to the Internet.

Given the signifcantly reduced number that made it to a third strike, piracy has dropped fairly significantly since the law was initially put into place, while digital sales and revenues for the music industry have begun to stabilize.

Comments

[Intiqam]

This entire topic is cosunnifg. Both parties are right on their slant of this issue, kind of. Internet companies already use online restriction to sites. Have you ever seen the little yellow bar at the top? My Internet firewall, Norton, would over power my web browser because the site that I was using wasn't legitimate, or so Norton deemed so. I would have to rework my settings in my firewall and computer to allow me to Accept, the access to the site, which could cause viruses to my computer. And of course it did. I know that this sounds like a conspiracy, but this is true for Hewlett Packard (I know from experience). The computer is ruined within a year of using the web browser for illegal downloading, then in a year I have to purchase a new one. I can guarantee that if American's were not allowed to use our computer's for what we want, we would not be able to put so much on it and ruin the hardware. In turn, I can guarantee there will be a drop in sales with consumer grade computers. So, I am interested in what computer companies have to say about this problem. But on the other hand, free speech online? That's hardly the problem. That's just sugar coating the issue. The problem is people not making enough money. They don't care what you say or how you say it. You can say what you want, you can download what you want, you can look at what you want, but there's a price for everything. If you build it, they will come. What's going to happen from all this is internet companies are going to jack up the prices, (more than the prices they are raping us with now), and then everyone can be happy. Its going to be like advertising companies and web browsers. The companies will keep track of computer web browsing, and what your looking at will define a price from internet companies. Thus, if any of the cry baby publishing companies own rights to content, the internet companies will give a portion of their money to those other companies. Its a win-win, and that's why we have Occupy Wall Street. Because we the consumer, can't get ahead, only major corporations can. Oh, what's great about this is, at least they will have an acceptance agreement but who reads those anyway.

[Accident Lawyers Toronto]

A new report on the effectiveness of the French three-strikes anti-piracy law claims that it managed to cut Internet piracy in half last year. While lobbyists are making preparations to show these great results to politicians worldwide, there is one thing the report fails to mention.

[Vanessa]

I'm glad to hear that the webcomic has helepd your sales. (I read all the volumes of ADS at my local library after finishing what was in the archives and discovering they had it. I was impressed by the size and quality of the printed version, so I'm sure your new readers aren't disappointing. And, hopefully, it will help make finishing the comic more affordable for you, which I look forward to whenever you have the time/money to manage it. :3) I've been tempted to buy the christmas deal myself, but I really need to be concentrating on gifts for other people, not for me. ^^;As far as piracy goes, I have heard of it being actually helpful once: the creators of the movie Ink' were actually quite greatful to it being torrented.But that was a movie that no one knew about before the torrenting. If it serves as a means of virul advertising, and it actually produces sales like in the case of Ink, great.Needless to say, most movies (or comics, or whatever) don't NEED that advertising. Not just the big ones either; if its a famous independent film/comic whatever, its not being helepd by piracy. (And, for the record, I watched Ink throuhg netflix, not torrent, but read up on it later and found out about the whole torrenting popularity thing)In other news, the one streaming comic site that did it right was OneManga. They had a policy of not hosting scanlations of work that was already liscenced in america, and when publishers expressed that they looked down on such things, period, they took things down without (as far as I could tell) any need for legal notices, but kept up summaries and title pages and discussion boards about the manga. (Yay actually just being fans!)