3-Strikes For Pirates Makes European Comeback Tour
Written by Ben Jones on October 23, 2009In a great blow for consumers everywhere, the prospect of 3-strikes for copyright infringers has returned with a vengeance, as both the EU Council and French Constitutional court pushed forward with their respective legislation. HADOPI is alive, and the EU has shredded requirements for judicial oversight.
The threat of 3-strikes based legislation had been reduced in recent weeks, with strong protests in the UK and proposed legislation elsewhere meeting stiff opposition.
However, none of this stopped the lobby groups, or the politicians looking to push for the ruling.
In the EU, the amendment, which would protect against 3-strikes laws by requiring due judicial process to occur before any sanction (such as cutting off Internet access), has been substantially watered down. Meanwhile, in France the Constitutional Court has ruled in favor of a slightly modified version of HADOPI – their legislation which includes a 3-strikes sanction.
On Tuesday, the Parliament gave up on Amendment 138, which had been voted on twice by the assembly, gaining a majority both times. The amendment was supposed to protect the rights of citizens from being treated as guilty upon the accusations of an industry group, and punished based on the same. It read;
Applying the principle that no restriction may be imposed on the fundamental rights and freedoms of end-users, without a prior ruling by the judicial authorities, notably in accordance with Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union on freedom of expression and information, save when public security is threatened in which case the ruling may be subsequent.
Instead, they are now considering a version which does not guarantee the right to an effective and timely judicial review.
Christian Engstrom, the Pirate Party’s MEP, commented on the amendment in his blog. He included the differences in text that have been made since Tuesday (bold denotes added text, strike-through indicates removed) in a meeting between three negotiators for the European Parliament and representatives for the Council of Ministers.
The changes included the removal of the judicial guarantee, that any measures should come only after a fair an impartial procedure (and should now just ‘respect’ such things), and the ACTA-like inclusion of ‘National Security’ clauses.
He summarized things simply, saying: “It shows utter contempt for Parliament by totally ignoring everything it says. The Council plans to bypass Parliament and once and for all prove that it is they who make the decisions, end of story.”
Meanwhile, France’s highest Constitutional Court has approved a slightly modified version of HADOPI. While initially blocked last September, a change to require a judge to sign off on the disconnection action (rather than the Agency itself) has meant it passed the Court. However, such court measures will be ‘fast tracked’ rather than given full judicial process, a situation the New York Times describes as ’similar to traffic violations’.
This has angered many, including (of course) the Pirate Party. Laurent Le Besnerais of the Parti Pirate and Pirate Party International called it “a huge blow for Internet Freedom.”
“In June 2009, this same Council declared that Internet access is a fundamental right which cannot be restricted without judicial process,” he told TorrentFreak. “Today, the council gives a judge the right and responsibility to pronounce a closure of Internet access to anyone suspected of having shared illegally. Furthermore, the suspect will have to prove his innocence, which creates a presumption of guilt.”
With the flip-flopping over these measures, it can only be seen as a greater boost for the European Pirate Parties in future elections. However, since much of the party works and draws its support online, there is the risk that members could start having their net connections cut off. With evidential standards so low, would it really be beyond the realms of possibility that political critics of these plans could end up being cut off at the say-so of those they oppose?
If all goes as planned the agency will be staffed next month, with letters starting in the new year, and terminations starting as soon as next summer. How long the law will stay once the innocent start being punished is harder to predict. As with IPRED, the people the law aims to deal with will just use seedboxes, VPNs, and open WiFi hotspots instead of their home connections.
Previously: Demonoid: An Interview With Their Ukranian Host
Next: NowTorrents Becomes TorrentFly After Google Penalty
82 Responses
Absolutely sick :(
yay, welcome to europe. what a joke.
Downright shameful
Guess the EU will bend over for anyone these days.
Fuck sake. Maybe a trip to Brussels to take a big shit on the parliaments doorstep is needed. Seems to be what they are doing to its citizens.
Can anyone recommend a reliable safe not too expensive VPN service?
I bet the guy who invented the internet wouldn’t have bothered if this is what it has become.
Yay! for giving up national autonomy to a bunch of clueless bureaucrats
Europe – back to fascism again, if it ever did leave that cursed continent.
Ironically, you can make some comparisons here with the U.S. battle for health care reform and Europe’s battle with copyright infringement.
anyone else see the lisbon treaty and international blanket laws like this being shoved up our asses?
imma kill a politician or two :)
That’s how little twerps and fascist operate, when they don’t get what they want they just repeat and repeat, even if it’s shown 99% of the population doesn’t want something, they know repeating will eventually allows their crap to slip through.
They learn that when they are annoying bastard toddlers already.
As for democracy and rights in the EU… well take the crumbs they allow you to lick off the floor and be thankful I guess, it’s fascism that is the banner and they are halfheartedly trying to deny it.
this is an absolute disgrace!
write your senator.
Lets just make a movie, put copyright on it. Then we acuse every ceo of themedia comglomerate’s (maybe even some stupid twats from the council) of having illegaly shared it. Byebye internet
It’s time for a global boycott of the MAFIAA’s.
These lowlife need to be bankrupted.
Unfortunately I don’t hold much hope that the uninformed will notice their rights being trampled, and stop supporting these oppressors.
I have stopped buying anything I identify as possibly providing funds to them, but it’s difficult because they get revenue from logos on t-shirts, kids toys, all sorts of product.
I would support hiring a few snipers to reclaim some wasted carbon though.
<- ashamed
only negative news lately.
soon i´ve actually got to listen to,or watch,all the shit i downloaded.
Surely there is a group of internet users who could do something about this. The name’s a hint.
So long for the European Parliament. They voted this amendement twice with scores of about 90% and they’re being ridiculed. What’s the purpose of such a parliament which costs a lot and whose decisions are worthless?
Besides, thanks to the MEP Catherine Trautmann for betraying what she was mandated for, according to La Quadrature du Net.
3-strike law can be ‘rationalized’ only by totalitarian capitalist ideology, but essentially, have nothing to do with eu funding values. this is scandalous.
“UN – Something to define a negative. See: ‘United Nations’.”
OMG – This is as bad as the US. Today I feel disgusted to be European.
They won’t be asking for money, but cutting off internet instead.
Hey Brussels — Maybe you can make a deal with Putin and create a gulag for filesharers in SIBERIA…
Funny thing is they actualy think we’re gonna buy ‘more’ dvds and cds…hehe…Old (media) ppl are funny…
Europe has a tradition of fascism. Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece… Sweden has got its brown-nose traditions as well. Apparently this is not history, the spook has gone live.
Boycotting mainstream media as much as possible now. Donated the TV set to the local charity shop, stopped reading newspapers, not downloading any commercial films or television series. Any more suggestions to what an individual can do, small actions as they are?
Wow what is up with those whacky Europeans lately?
Jess
http://www.anonymous.ua.tc
Do you work? Pay tax?
You’re part of the problem!
Stop supporting the real terrorists.
Hey guy’s use GNUNet more I can use the company LoL
Or the bitblinder if they ever liberate the downloads :)
Or maybe now that they are vacating GUANTANAMO BAY – send those evil pirate terrorists there…
If EU goes down this route, it’s the beginning of the end of free speech online…
Ideally corporations would like to see us read nothing but celebrity gossip, fashion and sports…
And as we are beginning to find out, CORPORATIONS NOT THE PEOPLE are in control of Western society.
This could be interesting – essentially they have given a license for everybody in France to pirate stuff – at least until they get 2 warning letters..
Welcome to the new and improved third reich…
I’ve already got my entire neighbourhood wireless networks mapped out, ready for use.
Defying an unjust ‘law’ is every democratic freeman’s moral duty. It’s similar to the mass trespasses of the early 20th century to secure rights of access to roam the land. If everyone had been ‘law abiding’ in this respect, we’d have not Public Footpath network through the countryside now.
Everyone, DROP THE EU!!!
It’s only stealing money and freedom from us.
The EU has too much power!
Well this is what you get when you buy crap from those people LoL
Sugestion: If you are European, have unmetered, unlimited internet, unprotect your wifi connection NOW.
Tell everyone you know to do it.
Let’s create a STRONG wifi coverage, that, even if some are disconnected, everyone is still able to use Internet anywhere.
I for one, will never even consider responding to the “Terrorist Mail”.
If necessary, there are several good crackers around that will provide me internet access forever.
So, before we need to crack someone else Internet, let’s just open them up. The protection from now on, only works against you.
Remember, plausible deniability. It’s their game, let’s play it too.
Think about it.
Can anyone recommend a reliable safe not too expensive VPN service?..Maybe this is the only realistic way forward?
To clarify a bit:
The council’s argumentation is incredibly thin this time. Furthermore, Jacques Chirac (well known enemy of Sarkozy and part of the constitutional council) was not there.
And now they’r claiming they will also fight “illegal” streaming :o
I sometimes wonder why brilliant people like then can be so dumb. Ah wait, they’re polititcians :(
Yes About Time!! :) Something Got To Be Done About All This File Sharing! And Maybe You All Will Buy Stuff Now What People Make. Think About It If Was You..? If Someone Put Song On A Torrent Site Or File Sharing Network What You Made!..? You Would Lose Money.. And TBH 97p Per Track Is Not Bad Price Or £7.99 For Full Album Think How Much It Cost To Make That Song Or Album..Etc
This won’t be the death of pirates, this will be the death of public WiFi… Good job, bloody wankers.
Mikey, what utter drivel! i cant even be bothered to begin pulling that staement apart. However, Im sure somenone on here will be more than happy to explain to you how your entire staement became nonsense after the first sentence!
Decision makers WE elected need to scrap this piece of shit plan of theirs already.
mikey don’t forget to wash your face when you take your head out of the the industry’s asshole the brown stuff is not attractive and smelly.
Yes something has to be done about filesharing they need to start to offer us ALL the content and services we want in the formats we want your right!
Maybe we will buy stuff from now on? i buy a PC game find out i then have to buy internet to activate it then find out i can only install that game even on the same PC 5 times then i have to re-buy it again? yep… buying stuff is really great idea
i buy a retail DVD/hidef movie then find it’s impossible to format shift to my other LEGALY purchased devices and they offer no way at all to format shift that media, they dont offer a service to buy that media in a format you need for your media players… yep buying stuff is a really good idea
Mikey you are an idiot.
No doubt president blair’s first edict will be to push this ill-gotten monstrosity through.
Who wants to join me in the assasination of peter mandelson and tony blair? Two people who deserve to die if I did see.
Piracy & You
Don’t you guys just love the EU? I hope you like your “one size fits all” laws put into effect by your unelected European Commission. The loss of national sovereignty is so sweet, ain’t it? Maybe now you know why some people are skeptical of the UN as well.
Somebody could do a video where those guy’s keep saying that piracy is destroying the industry and behind the guy is a graph of the profits made in this decade shooting up and up and up and up LoL
@27 ‘Or maybe now that they are vacating GUANTANAMO BAY – send those evil pirate terrorists there…’
Why, US gov is under the big watch full eye of the artists: who wonders which artists music they’re using to torture people with.
Talk about multiple copyright infringement. Not Using the music in a way the artists, and writers, didn’t sign off on, putting them in a bad light. Oh, and not paying for the proper licensing fees, after all we’re talking about an audience that totals in the thousands.
And, yes, I disregarded the fact that you obviously are ok with torturing people. Maybe your a masochist after all.
It’s about time they brought this law in. The frankly infantile, and pathetic whining of unemployed layabouts, hippies, communists, and ill-educated children about “we should have everything we want for teh free!!!!111″ is pathetic at best, and desperate at worst.
Its about time the pro-piracy morons got a job and grew up, frankly.
Sling them in a cell, they deserve nothing better
that’s people like 47 that should go in jail for supporting a corrupt system
he is probably one of those asshole anyway….
when only 15% of the people thinks its normal it is not anymore ….
US is doing net neutrality
EU is doing net circa 1984
that is what you get for talking shit europeans
USA USA USA!
If the entertainment parasites think that it is going to make us go back and buy their shits they are delusional! On the contrary we are going to continue to expend the boycott.
After Adopi I, purchase of music and movies went down by about 40%.
After Adopi II, there is no doubt that this will continue to go down.
Can you imagine if we can bring it to near zero?
The next step after this of course will be even worst.
NO JUSTICE NO PEACE!
Once our countries are taken back by us it is the corporate terrorists that we will send to Gatanamo as traitors.
Mark my worlds.
There is one troll using multiple aliases and pay buy the entertainment parasites.
DO NOT FEED THIS TROLL!
If you stop responding to him he will eventually lose is job.
Who wants to join me in the assasination of peter mandelson and tony blair? Two people who deserve to die if I did see.
And here what the press says about the music industry loosing so much money to pirates.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/6417323/Sales-of-music-singles-hit-record-levels-thanks-to-internet-downloads.html
Sarkozy is a jew, disguised as a cathollyc.
He has spent his life as a lawyer helping the millionaires and corporations hiding their money from the taxman in paradis fiscal countries. He sold France assets to Bouygues at low a very low price when Financial minister to buy it again (with the taxpayer money) 2 years later, at an inflated price. He used music for his conferences, without paying due. Sort out his son from a run away accident (the son caused an accident and didn’t stop), tried to put him in charge of the Defense financial industry, and support fiercely Tony Blair (the war criminal and another fake catholic) as an unelected president of europe.
I guess you got the picture of the dude.
A gangster with a pretty wife.
A fascist in the growing.
That’s why you live in Canada! and really people, don’t pay attention to trolls, their just trying to get a response.
I am trying to get as many folks as possible to spread the word and to do this as well and maybe together we will be able to hurt the RIAA,MPAA,Bigwig asshole corporations,etc.
these folks live off our money so we should all join together and::::::
1.stop buying any new music from any artist and/or label who is corporate and/or signed to an organization like the RIAA
2.if you need music from one of the bigwig artists you can always buy it USED NOT NEW.you will get your music and the label will get none as the shmucks deserve anyways
3.same goes for any movies you want
4.the only new products i buy now are TV Show Boxsets of shows I like cause that might help to get another season aired and we all have to support our fave TV
1. French Constitutional court which one they had so many constitutions.
2. Leave the EU and ask Obama can we join his union.
3 .Vote for the Pirate Party
Ho-kay… Time to show them who is boss. Start a worldwide boycott for 24-48 hours. All pirate parties can decide when, inform the public for the preceding week and we all shut down our connections worldwide for 24-48 hours…reason? Copyright reform, net neutrality and proof of infringement required before disconnection. It is something we can all do and would make a very powerful statement to the power mongers.
A sampler collection of free/libre music:
http://www.sfu.ca/~rmacinty/music/misc/
I might try to come up with a list of similar films.
I’m looking forward to the new white-spectrum hardware for wireless p2p.
Disconnection may be a thing of the past if your system functions as a relay. Enough wireless p2p mesh clouds could spell the beginning of another network. Apparently there are already a few floating around. One uses shortwave radio, although it is reputedly slow and only used for text.
Politicians look out for themselves and pander to corporations, in doing so they try to fill their pockets as quickly as possible whilst also securing future employment with said corporations, this is called POLITICS, bend over people and get used to it..
.
About GNUnet !!
Interesting project! Hope it will become very used and popular !!
.
we need a new Guy Fawkes!
do whatever you want euro lawmakers. i dont care. i will still share. i will download, pass copies physically, and then laugh at you as you try to wipe my flung shiit off your face. we rise like wheat in an endless field, you can never eat us all. F\/CK YOU
Really, I’d need to see damn fascist in uniform in my garden executing people before I’d call the US better.. maybe.
@Gabriella the fascist are refered to as brown-shirts not brown noses, brown nosing is a whole different thing.
Unless you actually meant kissing ass?
And to the people proud of the US net neutrality, yeah if it pans out the net will be neutral.. but under federal control, headed by the FCC, have fun on internet and expect a $5000 fine if any nipple is shown or a wrong word is uttered, they’ll know where you live too.
They hung mussolini and ripped him apart, Hitler was forced to hide like a pussy and kill himself. Facism, gtfo.
I’m sooooo tired of representative political systems. Let’s hope that somewhere, sometime a direct democracy systems sparks and i am done with the EU.
As I was ah file sharing I saw a sign there
And on that sign it said “no file sharing
But on the other side it didn’t say file nothing’
That side was made for you and me file shares
Probably, around 2010 they’ll start outlawing blogs, TorrentFreak and every bittorrent/file-sharing related software out there. See y’all on the darkside.
Alright, enough with the doom and gloom! Here’s another take on how societies might operate in the near future, namely through direct participation by its members, the people. If what is being discussed in the film ‘Us Now’ will actually be realized, by that time file sharing of copyright protected material may well be
treated in a whole different manner than it is today. Us Now is a film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the Internet.
About the film:
SYNOPSIS
In his student flat in Colchester, Jack Howe is staring intently into his computer screen. He is picking the team for Ebbsfleet United’s FA Trophy Semi-Final match against Aldershot. Around the world 35,000 other fans are doing the same thing, because together, they own and manage the football club. If distributed
networks of people can run complex organisations such as football clubs, what else can they do?
Us Now takes a look at how this type of participation could transform the way that countries are governed. For the first time, it brings together the fore-most thinkers in the field of participative governance to describe the future of government. It tells the stories of the online networks whose radical self-organising
structures threaten to change the fabric of government forever.
Us Now follows the fate of Ebbsfleet United, a football club owned and run by its fans; Zopa, a bank in which everyone is the manager; and Couch Surfing, a vast online network whose members share their homes with strangers.
The founding principles of these projects — transparency, self-selection, open participation — are coming closer and closer to the mainstream of our social and political lives. Us Now describes this transition and confronts politicians George Osborne and Ed Milliband with the possibilities for participative government
as described by Don Tapscott and Clay Shirky amongst others.
Watch it here: http://watch.usnowfilm.com/
Suck on that Eurofags, with your “Oh we’re so much better than America, we’re smarter & more technologically advanced.” Well now your fkin stupid ass government is effectively shit-canning your internet! AHAHAHHAHAHAHA
GO OBAMA!
More sad pirates trying to justify theft. maybe its time you grew up?
and then the Internet evolved into a real anonymous wide area network protocol.
And my country was about to celebrate the 35 years since the fascist government fell.
Guess we will all be back to the same crap…
+1 reason to use freenet
meanwhile the Finns are making 1mbit Internet connection a civil right…
northern europe 2(+1 for the fast connections in scandinavia), central europe 0
they can go f**k them selves and i’ll just stick to public networks from now on
Yeah like was is p2p doing it killing music yeah!
So why have the UK announced they have sold more Singles this year than ever before?
That’s what you get for voting for the EPP, or not voting something else.
Well, France is a nice case of a Government that rules for the money. Sarkozy has a lot of money from the lobbyists stuck into his ass and so he does what they want, not what the French people truly desire. Even though the French were the ones that voted for him, I still pity them because maybe there was no way they would know Sarkozy actually gives a shit for them.
That said, GM/Ford/Chrysler also tried to prevent Kyoto and the fuel efficient era by preventing stuff from moving that way inside the Government. And they failed miserably, leaving a half-dead Ford and 2 failing companies on the other side.
That’s bound to happen with the big entertainment guys unless they stop looking at their own bellybuttons. This war is already over, MAFIAA and merry friends are already bleeding. I can’t find any1 that fully support their actions and most people are disgusted by them. It’s a matter of time till we see their last breath. Unless they open their eyes b4 they lose too much blood.
If you’re not even remotely anonymous on this fucking thing, then you’re just another liability for every one of us that has to fucking deal with this.
Ugh, “though I be damned!”
“What is control?”, is control.
Nothing more and nothing less than some old timer growing old and leaving kids of tomorrow with the sins of yesterday, generally speaking of course.
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