By Drew Wilson
Last week, a report suggested that the government agency HADOPI was gearing up to combine website blocking, three strikes laws, search engine demotion and the cutting off of forms of revenue as a means to try and put the squeeze on piracy. Drew Wilson offers his opinion on the matter.
One thing I’ve been noticing lately is the fact that a number of implementations and variations of a three strikes law have been going sideways. The US six strike policy through the Copyright Alert System become a security disaster for users, the French variation shows that after implementation of the three strikes law only saw the continued slide of music sales, and the New Zealand variation has become little more than a money losing prospect. I think that when the music industry pushed the three strikes law, they hoped that one variation or another would prove to be some sort of magic bullet to fix all the industry woes. Now that every single one of these variations are starting to go sideways, the industry is becoming desperate and are wanting to prop this policy up with something – anything – just to try and prove that this policy is worth pursuing in other countries.