French 3 Strikes: Court Fines First File-Sharer, Even Though He’s Innocent
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
"“By saying he knew [his ex-wife] was downloading infringing content, but didn't prevent her from doing so, he self-incriminated,” he told TorrentFreak."
Innocent has a specific meaning - and in this situation it is implied he did not break Hadopi. He broke the law. However ridiculous, shortsighted and just plain wrong the letter (and intent) of that law is - he seems most certainly guilty of it.
The problem is that authorities are sending me, and thousand of other computer literate people like me across France, a very clear message:
It's okay to download music illegally as long as you don't do it from your own connection. Couple that with the fact that most home routers are still running on default WEP (?!) encrypted connections, and we're virtually outside the reach of this law.
This law is a terrible one, I really hope the government will do something about it. Thankfully, it looks like the victim is "only" going to be fined for 150euros. But what if the next scapegoat won't be as lucky? (In all honesty, the madness going on in US courts give me the creeps...)
Did he do anything wrong? In my opinion, no. Did he do anything wrong according to the Hadopi law? Yes.
My statement was purely semantic.
If someone told me that I was guilty of downloading Rhianna songs, I would point the finger at the woman in the house as well, but there's nothing to suggest that he knew that the infractions were happening at the time they occurred.
However, him getting three warnings without responding, well if he actually got those warnings, he deserves the fine.
I totally disagree with that idea because it's basically telling everyone that you should be doing your illegal downloading over someone else's connection since they'll at least share the blame with you, or at worst take the brunt of the blame. This will eventually result in all those nice businesses shutting off their free wifi. Heck, if I ran a business there I wouldn't offer wifi at all since there's the obvious liability.
But I did notice that the result is a somewhat reasonable fine as opposed to an outrageous gouging of money that will potentially ruin a person's life that serves as RIAA justice here in the U.S.
I suspect it's too late to fix that. I've seen "Hadopi letters" in hotel lobbies and heard about people shutting down public wifis for this exact reason.
Either they restrict the network drastically, which, in practice, means proxy everything and block every non-http use (I'm not sure it prevents anything). Or they track all the clients, but that's kind of hard to do for a cafe. Might work for hotels (I'm not even convinced of that).
After the second letter, you can bet the café will just cut the Wifi. I wonder if big brands like McDonald's will find a way to continue providing free wifi..
WEP connections can be breached in minutes, WPA connections are also easy to break if you use a dictionary word.
Everyone who is even on a "secure" network would have a right to be afraid of laws like this.
If you 'close' your network, and somebody does something nasty over it, you have to prove it wasn't you, while if you leave your network open it is obvious that it could have been anyone.
Closing WiFi networks is some of the worst kind of security through obscurity, and from the legal point of view of defending yourself from accusations based on what others do over your network, leaving it open is by far the best option.
It is also much better from a practical point of view, for example, now I hate traveling to Germany because of dumb laws like this and how sheepeshly Germans follow them, the whole country has become a WiFi wasteland, while in Poland you can find open WiFi networks basically anywhere.
Edit: in some ways it's worse because there are no courts involved, so there is not always any reasonable way to defend yourself.
A judge showing surprising common sense that, even in civil cases, you are not necessarily responsible for someone else using your connection.[1]
The RIAA continuing their campaign of ruining peoples lives over a few shared music files [2]
[1] http://gizmodo.com/5943025/you-are-officially-not-responsibl...
[2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/11/thomas_rasset_loses_...
The MafiAA knows they'll never get that judgement.. it's just to make a point. Besides that, any decent court will allow you to work out a payment plan. (I say this as someone who has been sued for absurd amounts of money before!)
It's annoying, unethical, disgusting, and a lot of other mean things, but hardly life ruining.
That's ridiculous. Imagine you get charged with drunk driving because unknowingly to your wife was driving your car while being drunk... How are such ridiculous laws possible.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Overton_window...
Staying too long in my parking space costs me about ten times what I would have to pay otherwise, and that's an offense that's easy to catch.
Would you be happy if a cop gave you a ticket for that amount every time you drove past one, because he thought you were speeding?