Rahm Emanuel’s brother pushes Obama to adopt France’s “three strikes” stance on piracy.

President Obama is considering adopting a three strikes rule for piracy. This is a bad idea.

Deadline London reports that Ari Emanuel (brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel) has been lobbying Obama to adopt France’s three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule in relation to illegal file sharing.

[Ari] Emanuel said he’s been speaking to President Obama about the U.S. adopting France’s 3-strikes-and-you’re-out stance. (Last year, France introduced a rule allowing legal action once Internet users had been caught illegally downloading 3 times.)

The three strikes rule, if you haven’t heard of it, gives file sharers “two chances” before taking legal action to deny them access to the Internet. It was passed in France in late 2008:

[The] French senate voted 297 to 15 in favour of a law that penalises illegal filesharers by cutting off their internet access. Under the legislation, internet providers would be forced to act as watchdogs, monitoring their customers’ internet traffic for signs of copyright infringement. Anyone caught illegally sharing music, movies or games would receive two warnings before having their account terminated.

This is a ridiculous law, of course. There’s no reason anyone should be barred from Internet access. It’s like denying someone access to the post office — it’s basically a free speech issue. Besides, it’s a bad solution as far as fighting piracy goes. Trying to stop piracy by laying down hugely disproportionate punishments on a very small minority to “make an example of them” simply doesn’t work. It ends up being more of a ritual sacrifice. From the perspective of the teenage/young adult pirate, it appears as if every few months a random person is dragged off and punished for something that everyone is guilty of (“everyone” is a slight exaggeration, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone under 24 who hasn’t committed copyright infringement, unless they’ve been living in a cave).

Of course there are better solutions that will actually work to end piracy, improve profits of record/movie companies, and avoid ruining the lives of young pirates — in fact, some such solutions have been discussed here on this blog and will be discussed in much more detail in the future — but such solutions mean these media companies must take risks and expand their business model. It’s much easier for them to just lobby the government to get the rules changed in their favor, and that’s what they’re doing.

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