irish donkey
The French three strikes... Strike one, delivered by email. Does not apparently need to state what the complaint relates to or who the complaining copyright holder is. Nor is there any real procedure to ensure anybody important actually read this email (a kid could delete it before parents get home). This will entail your connection to be monitored (inspecific, monitored how?) for infringement activity for a period of six months. Technically if you watch a music vid on YouTube, it is probably an infringement. You have no right of protest against this. Will this lead to...
Strike two. Your ISP will be obliged to serve a letter, containing the same information as the email. Will it be registered, or just "a letter from the ISP"? Again, with no requirement to state what and who, you don't have the option to contest anything, you just need to bend over and take it up the back passage. The monitoring for a letter will be a year. Again, no right of protest.
Strike three. Disconnection. Was to be the media companies instructing your ISP, but now they have to sweet talk a judge (in your absence - the charge of proof is on the alleged infringer!). The term of disconnection is to be any period up to a year - during which time you will be obliged to continue paying your subscription AND you will be blacklisted to prevent you taking a different subscription. All of this does not prevent the copyright holder going after you for copyright infringement in the traditional way. In other words, not only will you be paying for a service you aren't getting, but you can be punished twice for the same thing.
This is in addition to the questionable fact that "illegal" downloads should be permitted in France as we pay a levy on blank media. So thanks to this new piece of legislation (which pisses all over the French constitution - how can you have your internet connection revoked with no recourse to justice by a copyright holder under no obligation to identify themselves and the content alleged to have been downloaded?) we are effectively paying a tax to counter an illegal act. Way to go Sarko&co. I'd like to see this stand up in the ECHR.
To give you an idea of the mindset behind this, and - one might surmise - how corrupt the government is: the Minister Of Culture said "censée envoyer 10000 mails, 3000 lettres recommandées et 1000 suspensions par jour". It kinda leaves you speechless, doesn't it?
But it gets worse. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadopi and cry that such a piece of crap actually made it to be legislative.
Are you STILL sure you support the idea of three strikes? We are talking about an industry that is many sandwiches short of a picnic with enough money to bribe those influentials who are most friendly to their outdated business model.