A copyright-obsessed French government gets a taste of its own medicine

As you might expect when your president is married to a singer, the French government takes a fairly totalitarian line on copyright. The infamous HADOPI law effectively enables citizens to be prohibited from contracting Internet access with an ISP on the basis of copyright infringement complaints, apparently with such complaints centering around access from a particular IP address.

So it would be slightly embarrassing if it turned out that IP addresses belonging to the president's official residence and a French government ministry turned up in a database of illegal downloads. Unfortunately, this is precisely what appears to have happened: records of apparently "illegal" downloads from the French Ministère de la Culture and Élysée (official presidential residence and offices) have turned up in the databases of YouHaveDownloaded.com, a site publishing records from (among other sources) various public BitTorrent servers.

So, should we conclude that a poverty-stricken Sarkozy has had to resort to using public resources to download illegal copies of his favourite flicks and tracks in these times of austerity? Should we now engage in month-long trial to determine whether we can prove beyond reasonable doubt that Mr Sarkozy did or did not download that dodgy low-quality MP4 of La Cage aux folles? Should the Élysée now spend public money on a lengthy witch-hunt to establish which petty office clerk or work experience temp is responsible for this shocking infringement of some random fat cat's right to stuff his coffers a little fuller?

Well, I would suggest not-- but that's the point. Hopefully this revelation may help the French government to understand people's concerns about the glib connection that they are insistent to draw between an IP address in a database and the download in question having definitely occurred under the actions of a particular person, and to weigh up the pros and cons of establishing totalitarian means in an attempt to enforce the practically unenforceable with arguable benefit to society.

Is copyright worth breaking the Internet over?

The truth is that for some time now, the Internet can no longer be relied on to fulfil its simple infrastructural purpose of delivering bytes from A to B unhindered when requested to do so. The appetite of the powers that be for intruding on their citizens' privacy on the one hand and for succumbing to capitalist pressures on the other make any Internet connection an increasingly noisy channel.

Lemley, Levine and Post now outline and give an enlightening critique of some recent and alarming steps being taken in their essay Don't Break the Internet. As an author, I completely sympathise with concerns about copyright, and I would possibly agree that the current process of having infringing material removed is insufficient-- whilst also suspecting that the impact of the "copyright problem" is massively overexaggerated. But as with traffic shaping measures (among others), it is particularly concerning to see proposals to allow fundamental pieces of infrastructure to be undermined almost on a whim. Is this really the most intelligent counter-measure to copyright infringement that we can think of?

Why lawmakers' ignorance matters

The other day I blogged on the apparent ignorance shown towards what is now basic technology infrastructure by members of a committee hearing in the current UK libel law reform case.

It appears that our lawmakers, possibly with similar knowledge of Internet infrastructure to those on the libel reform committee, have now allowed us to reach a stage where putting a link on a web site is an extraditable offence. I'm just going by what I've read in the media and cannot confirm any of the details. And the aforementioned article doesn't appear to mention What Law Has Actually Been Broken. But if true, I am slightly curious as to why the focus of the Powers That Be is on removing sites linking to the offending material rather than just removing that material from the sites hosting it. If I put a note on my web site saying "There's illegal stuff on the Internet and if you do a Google search for it you might find it", is that also illegal...?