Article: France Tracks Down 18 Million File-Sharers

You can view the page at http://filesharingtalk.com/content/1...n-File-Sharers

Under France’s new Hadopi law, alleged copyright infringers will be hunted down systematically with the ultimate goal of decreasing piracy making infringers better at hiding their infringement.

As a French citizen, i have only met 1 person who has recived an email, this law is completly useless because it does not apply to DLL sites like Megaupload and Rapidshare, that even before Hadopi, were more popular than torrents.

I just hate the fact that these warning can be given without a proper trail or something. I assume there is a way to contest it though? However the problem with such a system seems that a simple thing like "innocent until proven guilty" does not apply. Your guilty, just because someone used your digital road to do something illigal. I mean sure most of them downloaded it themselves and deserve the warning (although I disagree with this law!), but it still seems to be a step back into the wrong direction. I am sure though that such a law would not be applied in my country, unless maybe the EU forces it. First of all the ISP here would not simply roll on there back or bend over for such a thing. Especially not the ISP I am costumer off. They have been fighting against such rules and other crazy stuff (like storing all the data for x amount of months/years). In fact my goverment has changed some laws recently (rightly so as the current laws where outdated and because of a hole in the law made it legal to download in some cases), but state they will not go after individual downloaders, but after the source.

I agree with darkmawl. These days, the law needs to be able to identify the actual perpetrator, and not a trail leading to that person. Modern speed cameras not only catch the vehicle speeding, but also capture the face of the driver in the image. The reason is that a lot of drivers used to be able to escape fines and points by denying that they were driving their vehicle, and claiming that they didn't know who was driving it at the time of the alleged offense. If you include an image of the driver at the time, there is no get out clause for those caught. It is the same with IP tracking. Just because you can follow that IP all the way to a property, doesn't mean that the subscriber is the one conducting the illegal download. It could be any one of the household, or if they have WiFi enabled, someone close by even, who is not connected to the household. In any situation like this, the law needs to revisit how they would penalise someone based on evidence that is less than perfect. If this was a murder trial, the case would need to be thrown out, yet because the outcome is mere disconnection from the internet, the industry is pushing for more punishment. This needs to be addressed...

It's not hard to generate false evidence here. Should you own a tracker you could simply fake IPs some and insert them in the cloud. Afaik it's even possible to act under an IP you don't have (IP-Spoofing). Packets won't be delivered correctly, but the IP shows in logs and in BT clouds.