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Sixty people disconnected after spending several million euros. Hope the deterrent effect is worth it. Otherwise, this seems like a huge failure to me, as it h

by ovi256 15y ago

Sixty people disconnected after spending several million euros. Hope the deterrent effect is worth it. Otherwise, this seems like a huge failure to me, as it had from the start.

pflats 15y ago
One could also read this as: Within the year, of the 650,000 first offenders, there is only a 6.8% recitivism rate. Further, 99.99% of those initial offenders have halted their behavoir before the third strike. Also, a quick googling also gave me a population for France just over 65 million. Almost 1 out of every 100 people got a piracy warning in the last year. That's... pretty comprehensive. I was expecting to agree more with the OP here, but this seems to be having either a decent deterrent effect, or the people are getting good at going underground.
- morsch 15y ago
  You're assuming their methods of detecting copyvios are effective. I very much doubt they are, or they would have send out far more than 650k first warnings. It's ludicrous to assume only about 1 to 2% of the ~52 million French internet users pirate stuff. Having a bad detection rate will automatically result in a low rate of recidivism, simply because you're not likely to catch the same guy twice (unless you watch him more closely). We have pretty much no idea how many of the initial offenders have halted their behavior. Having a bad detection rate also makes it very easy to "go underground", ie. purposely avoid detection. E.g. using Rapidshare instead of Bittorrent (or the other way around, I have no idea) hardly seems very underground to me. But yeah: Installing an infrastructure to monitor your citizens internet use and sending out letters from the government, culminating in killing access to one of the primary infrastructures of the modern world is bound to be a pretty damn good deterrent. I'm sure they'll try to make plentiful use of it in the years to come. Maybe inciting dissent (aka "public unrest", "rioting and looting") will soon come with an internet ban.
Silhouette 15y ago
There are 650,000 people who have been sent the first warning letter. Only 44,000 have been sent the second. Only 60 have hit the third strike. We can't tell from those figures alone whether they all represent people who were genuinely infringing copyright and who really aren't any more. However, if they are even close, this will have been probably the most effective campaign to defend copyright in recent history, and it will have done it with very little actual damage to anyone, unlike say the lawsuit madness of the US or various recent DRM schemes.

by ovi256 15y ago

Sixty people disconnected after spending several million euros. Hope the deterrent effect is worth it. Otherwise, this seems like a huge failure to me, as it had from the start.

pflats 15y ago

One could also read this as: Within the year, of the 650,000 first offenders, there is only a 6.8% recitivism rate. Further, 99.99% of those initial offenders have halted their behavoir before the third strike. Also, a quick googling also gave me a population for France just over 65 million. Almost 1 out of every 100 people got a piracy warning in the last year. That's... pretty comprehensive. I was expecting to agree more with the OP here, but this seems to be having either a decent deterrent effect, or the people are getting good at going underground.

morsch 15y ago
You're assuming their methods of detecting copyvios are effective. I very much doubt they are, or they would have send out far more than 650k first warnings. It's ludicrous to assume only about 1 to 2% of the ~52 million French internet users pirate stuff. Having a bad detection rate will automatically result in a low rate of recidivism, simply because you're not likely to catch the same guy twice (unless you watch him more closely). We have pretty much no idea how many of the initial offenders have halted their behavior. Having a bad detection rate also makes it very easy to "go underground", ie. purposely avoid detection. E.g. using Rapidshare instead of Bittorrent (or the other way around, I have no idea) hardly seems very underground to me. But yeah: Installing an infrastructure to monitor your citizens internet use and sending out letters from the government, culminating in killing access to one of the primary infrastructures of the modern world is bound to be a pretty damn good deterrent. I'm sure they'll try to make plentiful use of it in the years to come. Maybe inciting dissent (aka "public unrest", "rioting and looting") will soon come with an internet ban.

Silhouette 15y ago

There are 650,000 people who have been sent the first warning letter. Only 44,000 have been sent the second. Only 60 have hit the third strike. We can't tell from those figures alone whether they all represent people who were genuinely infringing copyright and who really aren't any more. However, if they are even close, this will have been probably the most effective campaign to defend copyright in recent history, and it will have done it with very little actual damage to anyone, unlike say the lawsuit madness of the US or various recent DRM schemes.