France suspends three-strikes copyright law after massive data-leak

TMG, a private contractor that administers France's HADOPI copyright system, has been hacked, resulting in a temporary suspension of HADOPI. Under HADOPI, people who use an Internet connection where one or more users have been accused of multiple acts of copyright infringement lose their Internet access for a year. TMG was in charge of storing the entertainment industry's enemies list of networks that had been used by accused infringers, and their security was basically nonexistent. The hack resulted in a dump of administrative material and IP addresses, and the head of the HADOPI agency announced that they would not gather IP addresses while they got their house in order. The UK has a plan to gather the IP addresses of networks used by accused infringers as well -- will they pick a better contractor to administer it than France did?

The problems appear to be real. Eric Walter, the head of France's HADOPI antipiracy agency that administers the "three strikes" regime, took to Twitter to tell the world that "par mesure de précaution l' #hadopi a décidé de suspendre provisoirement son interconnexion avec #TMG" [as a precautionary measure, #hadopi decided to temporarily suspend its interconnection with #TMG].

This temporary suspension of the interconnect agreement means that TMG -- the only private firm cleared to collect the IP addresses needed for HADOPI to function -- can't provide new addresses for the moment.

French tech sites like Numerama have run with the story, posting lists of questions that "need to be answered" by HADOPI and by French data-security authority CNIL.

France Halts 'Three Strikes' IP-Address Collection After Data Leak

(Image: HADOPI, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from goodvibez's photostream)

• [Amelia_G]

  Is French computing generally very competent? I have trouble reading Le Monde on my iPad, for example.

• [OrcOnTheEndOfMyFork]

  In fact, we could probably make the whole messy business go away if “discrediting state institutions” were simply made a crime.

  It’s even easier than that. Just get it over with and give Hollywood what it wants: shut the Internet off for everyone. Worked for Egypt!

  • [Gulliver]

    > It’s even easier than that. Just get it over with and give Hollywood what it wants: shut the Internet off for everyone. Worked for Egypt!

    Welcome to the wonderful world of core routing. Course in Amerika the gov’ment could never shut down the internet by killing one central exchange owned by the State. They’d have to kill three owned by companies that own the State. Why it’s almost as if…

    [This IP address has been suspended for reasons of national security. Thank you for playing.}

• [zapan]

  Giving public databases to dysfunctional private companies in exchange of retrocommissions is the true face of Sarkozy’s government. Under his reign, he multiplied legal databases, including some about opposing politic activists, to a tenfold.

• [Anonymous]

  “The government wants to put you under continuous monitoring. Do you accept?”

  Hell no!

• [axx]

  One can’t even really call this a hack.

  It was a visit, the door was left wide open really, they just looked around.

  It was so easy, the initial French blog title wonders if it wasn’t a honey pot…

  Official excuse is “it was a test and development server”.

  Anyway, funniest thing I’ve read so far on this whole mess is the fact that HADOPI has finally proceeded to its first disconnection! Only thing is, they disconnected their private police, not any citizens.

• [phisrow]

  So, if one were to (at grave peril to purity of essence) put on one’s hypothetical Sarkozy hat, this would be evidence that the internet needs Law and Order(tm) even more than ever and we probably aren’t paying the contractors enough or giving them sufficient extrajudicial power.

  In fact, we could probably make the whole messy business go away if “discrediting state institutions” were simply made a crime….

• [Mantissa128]

  Ha ha!