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Old fogey politicians in France try to enact reactionary laws to deal with Internet piracy

Old fogey politicians in France try to enact reactionary laws to deal with Internet piracy

On Saturday, 25 April, a small group of young, well mannered Frenchmen and women collected in front of the Assemblé Nationale in Paris, in a token protest. Surrounding them were a dozen of the riot police in body armour, looking like they expected a fight. Drunken brawls and good-natured rioting are usually to be expected during most blue-collar French protests. But this was a white collar group, protesting not against increasing the 35-hour-workweek, but a key Internet piracy law that detractors say raises serious privacy concerns.

Just like in the rest of the world, entertainment companies in Europe have been losing money on CD and DVD sales. In France, sales of these physically distributed formats fell by 19.9 per cent in 2008, continuing a six-year trend of decline.

French lawmakers decided that this decline was a problem caused by Internet piracy. Conveniently ignoring the 10 per cent rise in total global music sales for 2008, overall, their typically French solution was a new law informally called ‘Hadopi’.

The name comes from the uber-powerful proposed government body the law would create. Under the law, France aims to catch and punish users downloading copyrighted content by cutting off their Internet access. Entertainment companies would be given the right to make lists of offenders using DPI, or Deep Packet Inspection, a technology to examine all data being transferred from computers. Apart from being difficult to wholly implement, it would constitute a highly intrusive invasion of privacy, say critics. In return, the law would ensure that the delay between theatrical release and the fare’s DVD availability is reduced by a few months.

If that sounds wildly unfair, it is. Vote-sensitive members of parliament realised that too. The Hadopi law in its current form was rejected last week by the senate in a surprise move.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who backs the bill, isn’t fazed yet —the law with some modifications goes up a second time in a few weeks.

Jérémie Zimmermann of La Quadrature du Net (Squaring the Net), a French civil liberties group, calls the law “inefficient, inapplicable and dangerous”. Inefficient because “it can be circumvented in about 20 different ways”, and dangerous because it empowers “a private police of the entertainment industry” which would cut off access to the Internet for “entire families”.

The law would essentially allow “agents rubber-stamped by the Ministry of Culture to collect and provide lists of IP addresses”, continues Zimmermann. “And that’s evidence that you, as a user, can’t oppose.”

Under the law, the burden of download prevention lies with the user. If your Wi-Fi connection were to be used by someone else for illegal downloads, you would be prosecuted and not the actual downloader, and the only evidence of all this activity would be an uncontested IP address collected by an arm of the media company concerned.

Hadopi’s obvious unpopularity still has to butt heads against formidable foes —established business interests meeting political interests. The law was designed by Denis Olivennes, former CEO of FNAC France’s gigantic electronics and media retail chain. It comes on the heels of various other measures aimed at policing the Net and protecting copyrights. In Europe, online digital sales haven’t yet taken off, and media companies haven’t figured out how to successfully change their business models.

And France is not the only country attempting to fight Internet piracy through such measures. Denmark issued an injunction to ISPs to block access to mega-popular torrent search site The Pirate Bay. And Sweden, where The Pirate Bay is based, has infamously sentenced the owners of the website to eight years in jail. It also issued a directive basically allowing copyright holders to sue supposed pirates directly.

And if France does pass this law, the world’s toughest, it would set a new international precedent for other countries.

What has suddenly made these peaceful Scandinavians and other Europeans enact near-draconian measures against an activity that nearly defines web activity today?

France, for one, has a peculiar problem with technology. With the excuse of promoting culture, the country already adds an additional copyright tax on all possible recording media sold. This ostensible purpose of remunerating artists makes everything from blank CDs to iPods and hard drives more expensive here, leading to a backlash. Even before the crisis, the biggest concern of heavily taxed French voters was ‘pouvoir d’achat’ or purchasing power.

Funnily enough, Hadopi would fall afoul of the European Parliament’s declaration that considers Internet access a basic right. On top of that, the very people the law claims to protect—French artistes—have started signing letters against the law. That list includes France’s ageing golden girl Catherine Deneuve.

As is often the case with governments trying to police cyberspace, laws cannot hope to match the progress of technology, especially information technology. Within days of Hadopi’s possible passage in the senate, and in reaction to the afore-mentioned Swedish directive, The Pirate Bay offered users VPN technology for a small fee. VPNs or Virtual Private Networks essentially mask the end user, creating virtual tunnels in the cyberworld, closed off to outside snoops trying to ascertain identities of users. Within days, 100,000 people pre-registered for the service.

What is increasingly clear to the Internet generation is that politicians and big business have absolutely no idea of how the Internet actually works, and what the real causes of Internet piracy are.

While copyright piracy is certainly an issue in Europe, the original problem has been that a business model built around sustaining a middleman—record labels and media studios—has been shot down by the Internet. As Zimmermann says, “The Internet is the perfect tool for getting rid of intermediaries.” For decades, record companies charged tens of dollars while paying artistes only cents for every album sold. What’s better for the artistes and the audience is to cut out the intermediary. Seminal group Nine Inch Nail’s Trent Reznor recently said in an interview on Digg, “I know the people running these labels, and they don’t know what’s going on.”

Which is exactly what world-famous musicians like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails (Nin) have been doing. In Grateful Dead tradition, Nin offered its last album, The Slip, free online. If downloaders liked the album and wanted to pay something for it, they could.

Convinced users paid for a limited edition physical release and merchandising. Trent Reznor called it “most successful”. His former recording label made nothing. And the album remains available as a free download on their website, www.nin.com. It’s just the sort of music that refuses to be nailed down.

French lawHadopiInternet piracyNicolas Sarkozy