France, Canada, the UK and France are among countries united — united in their determination to ram home the Three Strikes element of ACTA, the entertainment industry’s last desperate attempt to gain exclusive control of how, and by whom, content is distributed online.
However, ACTA — Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement — has been effectively countered by the European parliament, at least.
And in France where the Three Strikes law has been officially adopted, thanks to efforts by entertainment cartel representative Nicolas Sarkozy, who’s also the French president, file sharing has increased instead of decreased.
France’s new ‘Hadopi’ law “actively connects the country’s music biz through ISPs to music pirates, and penalizes repeat offending users by severing their Net connection after three warnings”, says Fast Company, going on >>>
Sounds fierce, right? May deter you from downloading that episode of How I Met Your Mother (rather, “La Manière Dont Je Me Suis Rencontreé Avec Ta Mère“) or Mika’s latest album? You may think so.
But, “Mais…Non”,says the story, because “Those French types are actually defying their government, as a frank telephone study of 2,000 Bretons by the University of Rennes shows.
“Comparing user habits before and after the enactment of Hadopi revealed that piracy rates of all types have risen 3%.”
Not only but also, “The manner pirates are using to acquire the illicit data has shifted though — away from peer-to-peer sharing systems like bit torrenting, to ‘file locker’ systems like Megaupload or Rapidshare, or illegal file-streaming systems which aren’t explicitly covered in the Hadopi law. This sort of piracy actually soared by some 27% after Hadopi (and probably actually more than this, assuming survey responders were wary of admitting to it), which demonstrates that the French public are much cannier than the legislators.”
It can, though, be assumed that “before long there’ll be a legal move to fix these loopholes”, Fast Company adds.
But not to worry.
Innovation and change, or anything else which smacks of upsetting the status quo, may be abhorrent to Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music, and Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom, NBC Universal and Sony Picture.
But together with competition, something else the cartels loathe, they’re what keeps the world turning, despite frantic Hollywood and the Big 4 labels efforts to lock it solidly into one place — their place.
Stay tuned as people not only in France, but everywhere, continue to share with each other online.