You may or may not know that in 2009 France accepted a so-called Three Strikes policy in an attempt to stop “illegal downloading” of copyrighted material. The official name of this initiative is Graduated Response. In general, this anti-piracy measure holds that users who are caught downloading pirated content will receive a warning letter from their ISP (Internet Service Provider). If you continue to infringe copyrights online after two warnings, your internet connection will be terminated and it can even result in litigation.
The French Minister of Culture encouraged all EU member states to follow their example. In 2009, United Kingdom tried and has given thumbs up yesterday. Germany did not even try; they simply rejected to even consider this controversial policy.
In the Netherlands there have been numerous actions undertaken by anti-piracy organizations such as BREIN and Buma/Stemra. You might know BREIN from its issues with The Pirate Bay, and Mininova and you may have heard about the “YouTube-tax” which was proposed by Buma/Stemra. However, not only do these instances fight for copyrights, the lower house of the Netherlands started to express their concern about online copyright infringement. Although, it was/is allowed to download movies and music for own use, but not to distribute these.
In October 2009, the Dutch government announced to prohibit downloading of copyrighted material for free with the condition that there are sufficient legal alternatives available. They too considered implementing the Graduated Response policy. However, after months since the announcement, the recently fallen Dutch government has declared not to implement Three Strikes. Former ministers, “Van der Hoeven” and “Hirsch Ballin” have written about how it is unacceptable to implement this measure. Even though it has been rejected, there are discussions about a new kind of agreement, the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). The Netherlands might join in on this agreement instead. The European Parliament has spoken against the Three Strikes policy as well, but the European Parliament is fed up with the recent secrecy surrounding ACTA and has even threatened to take court action!
In France, the activity level of frequent downloaders has increased since the implementation of Three Strikes. In addition, it has forced others to use alternative sources such as stream or private hosts. Private hosts are, with the current technology, it is near impossible to track these hosts. It currently seems that all hope lies in ACTA.
What are your thoughts about Three Strikes and how do you feel about the (perhaps upcoming) ACTA? Share them here!
P.S. Use Google Translate to translate websites to your own language.
Mar 20, 2010
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