ITWire

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.