France was one of the first countries to impose laws that require ISP’s terminate the service of users who repeatedly engage in copyright infringement. Under the rules, the entertainment industry tracks offenders and submits infringement claims to a specifically-created government agency named Hadopi. Hadopi then works with ISPs to obtain personal information and send out warning letters or kick people off the Internet. By October, the industry was already making 25,000 requests per day, a daily total they’d like to see at around 50,000. However, according to the Record Labels, Hadopi isn’t sending out warnings fast enough for their liking, only sending out about 2,000 per day.

Techdirt correctly wonders about any kind of accuracy in the claims process when you’re working at that speed:

Think about how many mistakes are being made when you’re sending 50,000 notices per day. Over the course of about five years, the RIAA apparently sued less than 20,000 people and still made a lot of mistakes. US Copyright Group got a lot of attention for accusing a few thousand people of file sharing particular movies and also appears to have made a lot of mistakes. Yet, here, with Hadopi, the labels are accusing 50,000 people per day, and are upset that Hadopi isn’t just rubber stamping all the notices? It appears that the record labels don’t care at all about what happens if they accuse totally innocent people.

Of course the goal of the record labels with any of these campaigns has never been accuracy or fairness. The goal has long been to generate media coverage and create fear, something that’s easier to do with the government’s help. Of course this is all a rather expensive taxpayer and ISP funded game of whack-a-mole, where non-infringing users can easily get caught up in the wash. Meanwhile, France piracy rates remain stable or growing as people simply move to less-watched alternatives like direct downloads.

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France was one of the first countries to impose laws that require ISPs terminate the service of users who repeatedly engage in copyright infringement. French anti-piracy outfit Trident Media Guard this week began tracking offenders, and will be submitting infringement claims to ISPs. ISPs must then tie the IP to a name, send letters to users, then ultimately disconnect them after repeat offenses. The size and expense of the operation is fairly staggering, as Torrent Freak explores:

The copyright holders will start relatively “slowly” with 10,000 IP-addresses a day, but within weeks this number is expected to go up to 150,000 IP addresses per day according to official reports. The Internet providers will be tasked with identifying the alleged infringers’ names, addresses, emails and phone numbers. If they fail to do so within 8 days they risk a fine of 1,500 euros per day for every unidentified IP address.

For scale, Time Warner Cable recently complained about similar lookup requests in relation to the “lawsuit-o-matic” campaign being conducted by the U.S. Copyright Group arguing that the maximum number of such requests they could handle was 28 per month; each of which Time Warner Cable claimed cost them $45. Of course in France, consumers are simply flocking to direct download, UseNet or other un-tracked piracy options, while ISPs are left footing the bill for the entertainment industry’s latest Sisyphean endeavor.

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Back in 2007, NBC lawyer Rick Cotton issued a statement to the FCC demanding they force ISPs to take action against piracy for the sake of the American corn farmer. According to Cotton, piracy was becoming such a menace it was keeping people out of theaters, in turn resulting in less popcorn sold. Cotton’s logic was back on display this week as the attorney spoke in Washington at a press roundtable outlining the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s intellectual property agenda. This time, Cotton equated the trading of copyrighted movies and TV shows to a “tidal wave” and “virus” while seemingly embracing ISP filters:

“The ISP community is coming to that recognition,” he said. “We need them to be authorized to take those measures. The specific techniques they use are the second part.” When asked about whether filtering web content would violate web users’ privacy, he said, “Does a virus filter violate privacy?”

With a Comcast acquisition of NBC in process, not too surprisingly consumer groups quickly slapped Cotton in a statement claiming his comments were “unconstitutional and anti-consumer,” while noting that trying to install filters that could detect fair use of a copyrighted file would be impossible. Public Knowledge also didn’t much like Cotton’s virus refernece:

“It is simply ridiculous on any number of levels to compare filtering for copyright to viruses. ISPs are technically able to tell what is a harmful virus and what is not, unlike the situation for copyright content, which may be used legally. Viruses are a danger to the ISPs network, and it is in their best interest to protect against them.”

Cotton subsequently denied to Multichannel News that he was even calling for ISP filters, and that neither Cotton nor the Chamber of Commerce’s Global Intellectual Property Center he chairs were “addressing the question of what technique specifically should be adopted” by ISPs. As most people know, filters are expensive, depend on hardware that can’t always identify content properly, raise privacy issues, and most users would find a way around them anyway.

Instead, what the entertainment industry and ISPs have hashed out in private is a model whereby P2P users are threatened with account disconnection. As has been the case for years, the entertainment industry’s intelligence gathering outfits identify users trading copyright files, then send a DMCA warning letter to the ISP, who then forwards that letter to the users. What’s changed lately is that ISPs have agreed to subsequently threaten those users with account termination, though as we’ve noted in some cases the ISPs appear to be bluffing – wanting to keep the entertainment industry off their back, but not lose paying customers.

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According to Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, the telco isn’t worried about the threat Hulu poses to their freshly created TV empire, because Hulu will probably be dead in a year or two from now. “This is in for the next eight to twelve months and in two years it won’t matter because the world will have moved on,” the CEO was recently quoted as saying. He might not be wrong — Hulu very well could be headed for also-ran status once Comcast acquires NBC Universal, and does its best to ensure that Hulu doesn’t rock the TV revenue boat or bump up against the cable industry’s TV Everywhere initiative. That said, “cable guys” tend to have a degree of hubris in thinking that Internet video will never really harm them, despite the fact that when/if Hulu dies, there will be a stream of competitors (including piracy) waiting in the wings.

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