If the law does say that you are responsible for what happens over your connection to the Internet then he is not innocent. Normally this would result in an abetting charge of some sort but in this case the law seems to say it's as if you committed the act yourself.
I totally disagree with that idea because it's basically telling everyone that you should be doing your illegal downloading over someone else's connection since they'll at least share the blame with you, or at worst take the brunt of the blame. This will eventually result in all those nice businesses shutting off their free wifi. Heck, if I ran a business there I wouldn't offer wifi at all since there's the obvious liability.
But I did notice that the result is a somewhat reasonable fine as opposed to an outrageous gouging of money that will potentially ruin a person's life that serves as RIAA justice here in the U.S.
Even more afraid than those of us that keep our networks open.
If you 'close' your network, and somebody does something nasty over it, you have to prove it wasn't you, while if you leave your network open it is obvious that it could have been anyone.
Closing WiFi networks is some of the worst kind of security through obscurity, and from the legal point of view of defending yourself from accusations based on what others do over your network, leaving it open is by far the best option.
It is also much better from a practical point of view, for example, now I hate traveling to Germany because of dumb laws like this and how sheepeshly Germans follow them, the whole country has become a WiFi wasteland, while in Poland you can find open WiFi networks basically anywhere.
> This will eventually result in all those nice businesses shutting off their free wifi.
I suspect it's too late to fix that. I've seen "Hadopi letters" in hotel lobbies and heard about people shutting down public wifis for this exact reason.
Either they restrict the network drastically, which, in practice, means proxy everything and block every non-http use (I'm not sure it prevents anything). Or they track all the clients, but that's kind of hard to do for a cafe. Might work for hotels (I'm not even convinced of that).
After the second letter, you can bet the café will just cut the Wifi. I wonder if big brands like McDonald's will find a way to continue providing free wifi..
I totally disagree with that idea because it's basically telling everyone that you should be doing your illegal downloading over someone else's connection since they'll at least share the blame with you, or at worst take the brunt of the blame. This will eventually result in all those nice businesses shutting off their free wifi. Heck, if I ran a business there I wouldn't offer wifi at all since there's the obvious liability.
But I did notice that the result is a somewhat reasonable fine as opposed to an outrageous gouging of money that will potentially ruin a person's life that serves as RIAA justice here in the U.S.