Andre Yoskowitz
26 Sep 2009 14:07
Earlier this week, French parliament approved the highly controversial 'three strikes' law for Internet pirates, giving authorities the power to disconnect multiple time offenders from the Web completely.
The bill has been advocated by the media companies for some time now but has faced critical opposition in most nations. The media companies have also thrown around a lot of big numbers to justify the law, for example saying that music piracy costs the UK economy £200 million every year.
The ISPs have begun to fight back however, and BT in the UK has recently stated that the three strikes laws would cost ISPs £1 million a day in lost customers and infrastructure costs. Doing some quick math and we see that the £365 million it will cost ISPs is a lot more damaging then the "£200 million" that music piracy is costing the economy. Of course, both figures have little to no solid data to back them up, but still a very interesting debate.