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Posted by Mark S Fiore
France seems to be one of the first to take a stand on illegal internet downloading by establishing a three-tear warning system for violators. Repeat offenders are given less leniency with punishments of up to a year of cut internet, two years in prison, or a €300,000 fine.
6 comments
Yup... that sounds like France! As an illegal downloader myself, I would not be happy with this haha but it probably is better for the economy to impose such restrictions.
Well, this is a far better deal than that in America, where if you are caught downloading you are sent a hidden warning email and then sent to jail or fined in the millions.
This could actually be a very successful way to put a dent in illegal downloading. Once a person receives a warning, they are very likely to stop there before getting into a much larger amount of trouble. This would probably be much more successful at ending a lot of illegal activity, instead of just throwing people in jail. There are too many people participating in this activity to use fear of incarceration to end it. Although, knowing France, I'm sure there will be a riot on the subject.
Illegal downloading CAN'T be stopped. It's been said that if you wage war with the pirates you will lose it. The only way to defeat illegal marketing is to make it legal, and find alternate ways of revenue.
* illegal downloading....not illegal marketing :)
I've never heard of a case that found millions as the fine for illegal downloading. Maybe all the cases put together.
I posted this because I find illegal downloading to be one of the strangest things we do, myself included. Its just most that do it would never call themselves a thief yet in reality we are steeling something. On the basic level downloading movie is equal to going into a store and stealing a movie off the shelf. We would never do that, yet do it all the time. Just weird how we view things
Actually, I remember a few trials where illegal downloaders were fined an extremely large amount of money. One woman was fined $1.9 million for downloading 24 songs. She was a married woman with four children and a good job.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/06/18/minnesota.music.download.fine/index.html
Now, I think that is certainly the wrong way to go about prosecuting people. If anything, it should be the uploaders who are prosecuted. If it is possible at all to stop illegal downloading, it is through ending illegal uploading. People won't download any more if they can't get what they want. That being said, I agree with G-Unkovski, that illegal downloading will never stop, especially since it is a global problem and each country has its own laws. The best way to deal with this problem is to make it legal and find another form of revenue. There will likely be many more sites like HULU springing up, as network television is no longer popular on the network.