French Press: Romanian hackers cooperate against authorities, after a person was fined 3,000 euros for illegal file sharing

Marţi, 4 august 2009, 19:29 English | Regional Europe

The case of the Romanian who received a 3,000 euros fine because of file sharing with copyrighted content attracted unexpected reactions in France, where IT websites say that the hackers took their revenge on the website belonging to the authority who made possible fining the Romanian who shared 66 GB of music online. The French say the fine is the equivalent of nine Romanian medium incomes and it made the UPFR website to be temporarily considered virused by Google.

France has a special reason to follow the events in Romania because, for some time now, because the Hadopi law is currently trying to be implemented. According to this law, anyone who shares hacked content should be left without internet connection, if they don't stop after three warnings.

French website PCImpact reads that the Romanian Producers of Phonograms Authority (UPFR) made possible awarding a 3,000 euros fine to a Romanian that shared 66 GB of hacked music online. According to the French, the fine is equal with nine medium Romanian incomes and the UPFR tried to pose as a knight on a white horse by bringing the user to justice to set an example.

Freenews.fr website considers the fine to be excessive and adds that it brought unexpected consequences: UPFR's website was attacked by hackers and considered by Google and Mozilla Firefox to be dangerous for PCs.

The website's issues have now been solved, the alerts are gone and accessing it is not a problem. The French appeared to be very interested in the case, after the law of the three warnings has blocked and is currently being subject to modifications.