France takes a step in network monitoring that should be an attempt to stop casual piracy by monitoring the internet usage of ISP users across France. Then penalty for French Bittorrent users is being cut off from the internet. The penalty for the French and the ISP’s is an administrative burden that in the long run can only be checked against the number of people who are taken off the internet.
What is not being reported, and what is buried at the bottom of the Reuters article is that moviemakers need to get to market faster, and the implementation of DRM free tracks that keeps users from playing music on any device.
The deal also creates obligations for film and music companies, who pledge to make their works available online more quickly and to remove technical barriers such as those that make music tracks unreadable on certain platforms. Source: Reuters
In all this is an interesting but very common act in many countries in the world that attempt to otherwise wall off sections of the internet. China, most of the Middle East, and most of South East Asia also do similar kinds of blocking.
Not what one would have expected from France, yet the good thing is that they are somewhat of a free reporter of information, and over time, the administrative and cost burden is going to have to be accounted for. It will be very interesting to see what the actual burden per French person is, what the burden for the ISP’s are, and what the burden is going to be for each person taken off the internet.
It will also be interesting seeing how they will be taken off the internet in a world of Wi-Fi and other technologies, open wireless access points, unsecured networks, internet café’s and other ways of getting on the internet. It may make more sense then to have French users actually pass the bandwidth and shutdown burden onto their neighbors, and other public places like the library.
Then there are cell phones that can also run stripped Bittorrent clients as well, so this is a big monitoring problem. There are so many devices that can be hooked into a network that will do some form of P2P, that just to monitor for one protocol across an entire infrastructure is something that even China or the USA has not done well.
What has effectively been created is an underworld of file sharing, where using open access on ramps to the internet will be more important than using your own paid for bandwidth.
There is a lot that can go wrong here, but then there is a lot that can go right. What will be the most important part of all this though, is to see if sales of media actually rises or still continues it slow steady decline. If media sales rise, then there is a powerful argument on continuing the ban on file sharing. If music and media sales continue to decline, then there is no one and nothing that can be blamed on except the people who make our popular culture.
