French Ministry of Culture: We Are Not Pirates, but We Are Investigating Accusations

The controversial YouHaveDownloaded service was utilized to appoint another French government institution whose members were caught downloading illegal content from torrent sites.

After 250 of their 65,000 IP addresses were identified as being used to share all sorts of content, from games to adult movies, the French Ministry of Culture came forward with a statement to deny all the allegations, claiming that it’s impossible to download bootlegged materials from within their networks, reports TorrentFreak.

Nevertheless, an internal audit commenced to investigate the accusations.

“The Management Information Systems Department ensures strict use of computers in its fleet. The configuration of the network prevents connections to peer-to-peer networks, which excludes any possibility of using such networks for illegal downloading,” the Ministry of Culture told French publication Numerama.

The problem is that while the French government has no problem convicting regular users of piracy acts in their three-strike law, when it comes to their own back yard, the same rules don’t apply anymore.

Ministry representatives state that the methodology used by Trident Media Guard (TGM), the company in charge with collecting evidence against Internet pirates, cannot be compared to the processes used by YouHaveDownloaded, but since their monitoring systems are considered secret we’ll just have to trust them.

Recently, in Germany, a retired woman that didn’t even own a computer or a router was ordered by a court to pay compensation to a movie company after a similar system appointed her as downloading the movie Hooligan using eDonkey.

In reality, different situations show that these tracking mechanisms are not foolproof and what HADOPI is doing can also cause erroneous results and innocent people can end up being blacklisted, without an easy possibility to prove the authorities wrong.

While piracy acts may be condemned for causing loses to the entertainment industry, the countries that implement drastic measures should make sure that everyone, including their own institutions, play by the rules.