France Cracks Down on Internet Piracy with new law

France has stepped up the fight against internet piracy with a bill that could see people who download illegally get cut off from the internet.

Offenders will receive a warning email, then a letter before facing legal action.

The Creation and Internet Bill set up a new state agency called the Higher Authority for the Distribution of Works and the Protection of Copyright on the Internet (Hadopi).

Michel Thiolliere, a French senator and member of the Hadopi, told the BBC: “The internet is a fabulous world, but it needs rules, if you want to get cinema, music or video games in the future.

“What we think is that after the first message…about two-thirds of the people [will] stop their illegal usages of the internet.

“After the second message more than 95% will finish with that bad usage.”

The French hope that it will safeguard their creative industries and make it clear that not everything on the internet is free.

Many opponents have pointed out that it will be notoriously difficult to enforce and prosecute. The failure to stop torrent sites like Pirate Bay, despite a successful prosecution, makes punitive legal action look like an increasingly irrelevant way of dealing with copyright breakers.

To many internet users this seems an illogical and technophobic step, but France has a long tradition of zealously guarding its culture.

In December 2009 Sarkozy caused uproar when he attacked Google’s plans to digitise classic books.

“We won’t let ourselves be stripped of our heritage for the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is,” he told a press conference in Alsace at the time.

Instead he promised that a similar French project – Gallica – would be financed with a loan worth possible billions of Euros.

“We are not going to be stripped of what generations and generations have produced in the French language, just because we weren’t capable of funding our own digitisation project,” he said.

In 2005 a joint French and German venture to produce a search engine called Quaero (Latin for “I search“) was announced, though this has since been stalled.

It has been a year of unprecedented intervention by Sarkozy in the media, with successful projects to get young people reading newspapers and controversial changes to state television and to the independent status of Agence France Presse.

Tomas Mowlam

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Image Credit: Liako