three strikes

The majority of the reports and press releases put out by the music industry in the past several years can be summarized in a few words: “Piracy is evil and we lose a lot of money because of it.”

The year of Internet censorship wouldn't be complete without the SOPA soap, the row between Megaupload and Universal, three-strikes plans and the countless other censorship attempts and anti-piracy actions that were carried out in the second half of the year.

Luckily, there were also a few positive things to report on.

One of the most important aspects of the UK's Hargreaves Report was that it called for copyright policy to be based on evidence.

It also noted that so far that simply hadn't been the case, and that practically all of the so-called "studies" used to justify laws in this area came from the copyright industries, with missing or dubious methodologies.

Well this is interesting. Switzerland, which has been a party to the ACTA negotiations, but last we checked had not signed on yet, has put out a report from its executive branch, basically completely downplaying the issue of file sharing.

We've seen similar scams for a few years now, but with the French three strikes administrators, Hadopi, sending out 650,000 first strike notices, it should come as no surprise that the scammers have jumped in to

The latest stats coming out of France's HADOPI "three strikes" (really three accusations) policy are really quite stunning.

In place since January 2010, the French solution to unauthorized file-sharing has been met with controversy every step of the way.

The so-called “three strikes” or graduated response scheme sees Internet users formally warned when they are monitored sharing copyrighted material online without the rightholder’s permission.

In recent years the entertainment industry has been lobbying extensively for tougher anti-piracy legislation.

So-called three-strikes policies, where repeat copyright infringers are disconnected from the Internet, are particularly high on their agenda.

The MPA(A) is trying to get a tight grip on piracy in Australia, mainly through affiliate groups such as AFACT.

Recently published cables by Wikileaks revealed how Hollywood is secretly pushing their agenda down under.

Back when the legacy entertainment industry and US ISPs announced a "voluntary" six strikes plan to deal with those accused (but not convicted) of copyright infringement online, we noted that the agreement seemed to bend over backwards to make the appeals process hard.