France adopting law to cut music pirates off the Internet, wrong legislation?

On Tuesday the National Assembly of France passed the law to prohibit illegal music and video downloads through the internet and punish those who were three times found sharing the files in breach of the copyrights. The bill institutes the first government agency that will be responsible for tracking and punishing online pirates. The organization under this legislation will be known as HADOPI, the High Authority for Copyright Protection and Dissemination of Works on the Internet.

The bill passed on Tuesday in a well-attended 296-233 vote in the National Assembly. The bill previously passed the National Assembly on a rather smaller, dead-of-night 21-15 vote. But even if the legislation passes the Senate on Wednesday successfully there is still much to be done to enforce it.

Earlier, last week a European Parliament passed a regulation that bans EU governments from cutting off a user's Internet connection without first passing through a court of law. Thus the French bill will be finally in effect only after negotiations with the European Council. About 90% of that body said that it would not support HADOPI's "graduated response" unless judicial oversight was put into place to manage the process.

Under the statutes of the new regulation violators of the copyrights will be warned through the two email messages followed by a certified letter. 90% of that body said that it would not support HADOPI's "graduated response" unless judicial oversight was put into place to manage the process.

The bill would create a government agency to sanction offenders, leaving monitoring efforts to entertainment industry watchdogs.

According to law professor Wendy Feltzer, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, while the French approach is quite innovative the bill is actually ill-adapted to the digital age.

"It's backward to so much of how the Internet has been developed," she said. "It's trying to retain a business model that is already evolutionarily behind the times."

"The law is ineffective, inapplicable and dangerous," said Jeremie Zimmerman, who heads a Paris-based Internet freedom activist group.