Davey Winder
Monday, 23 June 2008 03:54
IT Policy -
Regulation
Page 1 of 2
France gets set to get tough on Internet pirates as President Sarkozy tells his cabinet there is no reason why it should be a lawless zone. The HADOPI bill, if made law, will see persistent offenders being banned by all French ISPs.
A new three strikes and you are out law being proposed in France will
take the toughest of stances against those who download pirated music
or video files: no Internet access for up to a year. A state agency has
been established to enforce this. The High Authority for Copyright
Protection and Dissemination of Works on the Internet, or HADOPI (Haute
Autorite pour la diffusion des oeuvres et la protection des droits sur
Internet) for short.
HADOPI will take responsibility for collecting
and collating the IP addresses of those people who have been
downloading pirated media. The ISPs will be required to make this
information available to it.
The 'loi HADOPI' bill was introduced to Parliament by France's Cultural
Minister, Christine Albanel and has now been approved by the Council of
Ministers. If it passes a Parliamentary vote later in a few months,
HADOPI will become law early in 2009.
Organisations vocally opposing HADOPI include the usual consumer and
civil liberties groups. No surprise there, but the fact that both the
European Parliament and France's own state data protection agency have
also complained about the move certainly is.
Quoted in
The Times,
Albanel says that it will take "a preventive and educational approach"
to the problem of piracy. In which case one has to ask why France needs
yet more laws, and yet more punitive measures.
