14 DAY TRIAL // Hadopi, the French anti-piracy organization that was put in charge with handling the now famous three-strike law, is determined to attack piracy from another angle. More precisely, they want to go after the means utilized by illegal file-sharing websites and cyberlockers to fund their operations.
According to TorrentFreak, Hadopi plans on making sure that advertising networks, banking and payment providers, and Internet service providers fully cooperate to make sure the financing of these websites will no longer be possible.
“The knowledge gained through the successful deployment of the flexible [3 strikes] response and technical, legal and economic experiments carried out by the Hadopi, today allow us to initiate a new stage in the protection of copyright on the Internet,” Hadopi said in a statement.
Guillaume Champeau of French news site Numerama believes they have every chance of succeeding since if they can’t find existing laws to rely on, they can always demand new ones that will serve their purpose.
“It is an extremely broad provision – the broadest I know in French law – which could lead to an infinity of measures: filtering, domain names foreclosures, payments prohibition, etc,” said Champeau.
He continued, “It has no limit but the imagination of rights holders, and does not require that the impacted websites defend themselves. So I guess it is very close to the Protect-IP Act. The Hadopi will probably push a slight rewriting of the law, so that it can go before the court to use this provision itself, when today it is only available only to rights holders.”
The three-strike law was a massive success in France and many other countries started adopting similar regulations to fight the piracy phenomenon. If they manage to fulfill this second objective, then surely file-sharing websites and cyberlockers will have a huge problem on their hands.