The US Internet Service Providers Six Strikes Rule; A Gift from the French

by Tony Guo

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) recently aligned themselves with the movie and music industries in the fight against piracy. Under the agreement, users will have six strikes before their internet may be shut down. Shutting down internet is not new (see the history behind bit torrent users). What is new is the ISPs involvement. The probability of being caught increases drastically. The US may have gotten this idea from the French.

If the US models the French, pirates may find themselves in hot water. French authorities received over 18 million reports of unauthorized file sharing. Each of these reports had information on what was downloaded and the corresponding IP address. French authorities sent 1 million requests to ISPs to identify the subscribers. From these requests, an impressive 900,000 subscribers were identified. French authorities promptly sent 470,878 emails warning subscribers that they were downloading illegal material. Most receiving the email stopped their illegal activities. 20,598 subscribers continued infringing and were sent second warnings.

While the French have not sought damages yet, they can. With evidence provided by ISPs it is easy to convict and find. French infringement fines go up to 2,100 dollars.

ISPs in the US are on the record saying they would not provide subscriber information even if asked. However, this policy may chance with time.

If we extrapolate the French statistics to the US, the results are a little frightening. The population of France in 2011 was 63 million. 18 million people were reported for infringement or about 28.6 percent of the French population. French authorities only investigated 1 million requests but were able to identify 90 percent of the subscribers.

In the United States there are almost 309 million people ( based on the 2010 census). For our extrapolation we assume Americans infringe as much as the French. In the US there will be 88.4 million reports of infringement. If the US decided to investigate all of these cases (it is unclear how or why France chose to investigate only 1 million of the 18 million cases) and successfully traced 90 percent of the subscribers than 79.6 million people will be on the hook.
Assuming each of the 79.6 million people pay a 2,100 dollar fine for copyright infringement, the total fines collected would be over 167 billion. But let’s go crazy with our figures. Let us assume each infringer settles for 4,000 dollars (a typical settlement offer), the settlement would net 318.4 billion dollars for the media industry. That figure is almost six times what Bill Gates is worth or equivalent to making Transformers Movie (the first one) two thousand times.