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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. 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. The entertainment industry has been angry that ISPs <a href="http://www.zeropaid.com/news/91562/french-three-strikes-warnings-far-below-music-industry-hopes/">haven't been moving fast enough</a>, and in turn ISPs are now warning customers they <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110102/14122212488/end-result-hadopi-higher-isp-fees.shtml">need to raise rates in order to handle the volume of entertainment industry requests</a>:
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It's not like people didn't warn everyone what would happen with various three strikes laws. The costs for ISPs were widely discussed, even if the recording industry lobbyists insisted they were overblown. Yet, here we are, a few months into France's HADOPI implementation of three strikes, and French ISPs are already warning users that they need to jack up fees to pay for compliance with HADOPI. And, of course, no one has provided any evidence that kicking people off the internet for file sharing makes anyone any more likely to buy.
Also note that <b>everybody</b> winds up paying more money regardless of whether or not they've pirated content under these plans. There's also the fact that this isn't actually doing anything to seriously curb piracy, with pirates simply migrating to other distribution networks and cloaking their online activities. So in the end all France really gets is higher broadband prices, a bunch of potential customers who won't be able to go online -- and a massive Sysphisean government bureaucracy funded by taxpayers. Why? Because the entertainment industry couldn't adapt their business models to the broadband age.
Source: DSLReports.com
