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)