Abstract
The Internet has changed fundamentally our ways of living. Research director at Inria Gérard Berry tells the story of how he used to organize a party: he had to call all of his friends one by one and tell them to call their own friends, and so on. Nowadays, one Facebook message is enough ! The possibility to have immediate access to the virtual resources available on the Internet has also altered our perception of property. It seems normal to download without paying because everything is dematerialized, and thus the sense of ownership and uniqueness that is linked to the possession of a material object disappears with the dematerialization of some goods.
This has led some governments to try and make some new laws to contain the illegal downloading of goods. An example of such a law is the Hadopi law in France. This law, passed by the French Parliament in May 2009, aims to protect the property rights on the Internet thanks to the process of “gradual response” to the illegal action: if an illegal downloading is detected, the user will receive three warning letters from Hadopi, asking the user to stop. After the third warning, the user's Internet connection is cut, and he is not able to change his Internet Service Provider (the company that gives him Internet access, such as Free or SFR).
This law has been heavily contested: even though protecting the ownership rights on the Internet is a laudable goal, the way the law proceeds may not be the best, and may not be just. Moreover, one may wonder if it is just to try and protect the Internet goods from unlimited downloading. Through the study of the Hadopi case, based on the analysis of a concrete situation of the application of the Hadopi law, we will thus wonder if justice can exist on the Internet.
