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The French agency responsible for overseeing their 'three-strikes' anti-piracy law, Hadopi, has come out with a proposal to install spyware programs on people's PCs, or in their routers, to monitor people's Internet usage and make sure they're not going to "disallowed" places.
The software would keep a black list of websites that can't be visited by users, a black list of keywords that can't be searched for online, as well as a grey-list of websites that will force users to answer a prompt before allowing them to proceed (something alone the lines of "This website is known to hosted pirated content. Do you still want to continue?"). Another feature of the software would be to scan people's computers for "bad" software and report back to the government, including the date and time when these software are launched.
The plan goes as far as having this "tool" installed onto hardware routers to be sold in France. Hadopi says that users can disable this "service", but a log of when it is disabled will also be sent to the government.
Since the introduction of the three-strikes law, piracy rates have not only not gone down, but gone up, as people used alternative sources for pirated content not monitored, or not able to be monitored, by Hadopi. So it seems Hadopi's new plan is to address this loophole by getting closer to the source of the piracy, people's PCs, and start the monitoring there.
French Internet rights group Quadrature du Net has attacked the proposal, calling it "obscene".
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The software would keep a black list of websites that can't be visited by users, a black list of keywords that can't be searched for online, as well as a grey-list of websites that will force users to answer a prompt before allowing them to proceed (something alone the lines of "This website is known to hosted pirated content. Do you still want to continue?"). Another feature of the software would be to scan people's computers for "bad" software and report back to the government, including the date and time when these software are launched.
The plan goes as far as having this "tool" installed onto hardware routers to be sold in France. Hadopi says that users can disable this "service", but a log of when it is disabled will also be sent to the government.
Since the introduction of the three-strikes law, piracy rates have not only not gone down, but gone up, as people used alternative sources for pirated content not monitored, or not able to be monitored, by Hadopi. So it seems Hadopi's new plan is to address this loophole by getting closer to the source of the piracy, people's PCs, and start the monitoring there.
French Internet rights group Quadrature du Net has attacked the proposal, calling it "obscene".
More:
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