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A court in France has made its first conviction under the country's three-strikes anti-piracy law. Alain Prevost of Belfort, eastern France, was fined 150 euros ($200) for pirating two tracks by Rihanna over his Internet connection. The conviction took place, despite testimony claiming his estranged wife was responsible for the downloads.
A cross-check of facts at TorrentFreak has called into question the effectiveness of France's three strikes anti-piracy law, Hadopi. Despite claims (below) by the Hadopi office that bootleg file sharing is down 66 percent in France, new music sales data shows that revenues were still down 3.9 percent over 2011, two years after Hadopi had been enacted. It points to the measure's warning and disconnection process not only having little effect but possibly having hurt sales by reducing exposure to new music.
The EU Court of Justice decided Thursday that websites such as social networks couldn't be forced to use anti-piracy filters. The automatic blocks wouldn't safeguard personal information, and could artificially impede the personal freedom to send and receive data, according to the Brussels ruling. The ruling was helped by an earlier November decision that had made a similar decision protecting Internet providers.
The IFPI in its latest study (PDF) saw an eight percent upswing in digital music revenue in 2011. The increase is the first it claimed to have had since 2004 and lines up with an American rebound in overall album sales. They were important enough for online content to represent 32 percent of the industry association's combined business versus 29 percent in 2010.
The first person known to have been disconnected under France's three-strikes law may well be an innocent person based on early reports. A 54-year old teacher, Robert Tollot of Loire, was banned from getting online after HADOPI enforcers gave him three warnings that his connection was being used to pirate material. He claimed to Numerama to not only be unaware of how to download content illegally, as he was accused, but to to have had his Wi-Fi hacked and to have been unable to secure his connection enough to stop attempts, even after the second notice.
France’s HADOPI “three-strikes” anti-piracy measures have led to the identification of 18 million alleged illegal file-sharers over the past 9 months. However, due to the high volumes of pirates being tracked, only 470,000 of the 18 million traced have received an infringement warning to date. Those who have received a second-strike total 20,000, while only 10 have been issued with a third warning. A judge is currently investigating the 10.
The IFPI tried to raise alarm on Thursday with a warning in its latest annual report that digital music sales were slowing down. Sales through iTunes and other outlets climbed by just six percent worldwide and made up 29 percent of their revenues. The slowdown came both from a maturing of the digital music market but was also blamed on piracy.
The French National Assembly on Wednesday approved a section of a bill that would allow the government to filter Internet sites blacklisted by the Ministry of the Interior. Section 4 of the Bill Loppsi 2 will allow this without judge or jury intervention and is meant to reduce child pornography sites and cybercrime. According to Le Point, many of the sites are hosted by countries abroad, and the Ministry of the Interior will send the blacklist to ISPs in order to block them.
France's three strikes anti-piracy law has actually increased the amount of piracy in the country, a new study has revealed. Despite the threat of being permanently disconnected from the Internet in the country, frequent downloaders increased their activity 3 percent since the law, also known as Hadopi, passed last fall. While BitTorrent use did drop from 17.1 percent to 14.6 percent, any who gave up torrents simply moved to streams or to private hosts using uploaders, which are difficult if not impossible to track with current methods.
