French Anti-Piracy Effort Costs ISP Users $8+/month, Stops 4% of Users from Pirating

[Kludge]

"One of the main arguments made by the entertainment industry in support of three strikes rules is that it won't really kick people off the internet, because so many people would just stop file sharing. It looks like that's not really happening. A new survey in France suggests that only 4% of people have decided not to file share since the new rules were put into effect. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to ask whether or not any of those people actually started buying music instead, but I would doubt it. A lot larger percentage said they'd keep on downloading, with many taking more precautions not to get caught. Meanwhile, about 75% of those surveyed said they didn't download at all... but they're not thrilled that they now have to pay higher ISP fees to cover the costs of Hadopi."

Article by Mike Masnick of Techdirt.com
Full article with reference links & comments @ http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110114/11315612672/not-many-french-users-scared-away-file-sharing-hadopi.shtml

[JacobR248]

Piracy isn't really an issue. When something is pirated heavily it's a sign that the delivery of the product was horrible. Take Russians for example, everyone 10 years ago thought that Russians were pirates and there was no use localizing a product. But for a Russian if I wanted to get a game or movie and if I wanted it in Russian, I had to go to a pirate. This was because there simply was no other way. But, then we started seeing localization of games and movies in Russia and piracy went down. I know some people think that they're not willing to pay money, but they have these 2000 dollar PCs and 50 dollar internet connections, so they're willing to pay for what they see as a good and well delivered product.

In conclusion I feel like DRM and anti piracy laws will only increase piracy, because the legal way of getting these things will become such a hassle.

[Kludge]

bump

[jmdrake]

That's stupid. I went to a talk last here. In Canada the songwriters association is working on a proposal where people can pay a flat monthly fee and then file share all they want. The ISP's under this plan would monitor which songs got downloaded the most and prorate the revenues accordingly. And the plan would be 100% voluntary. But noooo. It's all "let's punish the user rather than provide incentives for good behavior through the market."