<
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/11/13/isps-launch-legal-attack-on-italys-pirate-shield-blocking-law/>
"The copyright industry’s war on the Internet and its users has gone through
various stages (full details and links to numerous references in
Walled
Culture the book, free digital versions available).
The first was to sue Internet users directly for sharing files. By 2007, the
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had sued at least 30,000
individuals. Perhaps the most famous victim of this approach was Jammie Thomas,
a single mother of two. She was found liable for $222,000 in damages for
sharing twenty-four songs online. Even the judge was appalled by the extreme
nature of the punishment: he called the damages “unprecedented and oppressive.”
He “implored” US Congress to amend the Copyright Act to address the issue of
disproportionate liability. He also ordered a new trial for Thomas.
Unfortunately, on re-trial, she was found liable for even more – $1.92 million.
The RIAA may have been successful in these court cases, but it eventually
realized that suing grandmothers and 12-year-old girls, as it had done, made it
look like a cruel and heartless bully – which it was.
So it shifted strategy, and started lobbying for a “graduated” approach, also
known as “three strikes and you’re out”. The idea was that instead of taking
users suspected of sharing copyright material to court, which had terrible
optics, they would be sent progressively more threatening warnings by an
appropriate government body, thus shielding the copyright industry from public
anger. After three warnings, the person would (ideally) be thrown off the
Internet, or at least fined.
France was the most enthusiastic proponent of the three-strikes approach, with
its Hadopi law. Even though the government body sent out millions of warnings
to French users, only one disconnection order was issued, and that was never
carried out. In total, some €87,000 in fines were imposed, but the cost of
running Hadopi was €82 million, paid by French taxpayers. In other words, a
system that failed to scare people off from downloading unauthorized copies of
copyright material cost nearly a thousand times more to run than it generated
in fines."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
