This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Legal
French government draft alternative three-strike proposal
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 26 June 2009
The French government has drafted a new proposal which it hopes will make the three-strike system law in France. As previously reported, French ministers want to introduce a system whereby people who persistently file-share unlicensed music online would receive two warning letters and, if they continue to file-share, would have their internet connection cut off. The whole system would be run by a government agency called Hadopi who would have the authority to order ISPs to cut off offending customers.
Despite opposition from various quarters, the government eventually got the proposals through the country’s parliament, but the disconnection part of the proposals fell down at the final hurdle, the French Constitutional Council, which assesses whether new laws breach the country’s constitution. They said that only a judge should be able to deprive a citizen of their internet access.
The whole point of the three-strike system, and the Hadopi body, was to ensure disconnection orders didn’t have to go through a traditional court, which would make the disconnection process time consuming and expensive. As expected, French ministers are trying to get around the Constitutional Council’s ruling by creating a special fast-tracked judicial process exclusively for the Hadopi, which would basically see a judge rubber stamping the copyright agency’s disconnection rulings. Under that system there would only be a formal court hearing if an accused file-sharer appealed.
The new proposals will now have to go through parliament before going back to the Constitutional Council. Music business types remain hopeful the French government will get three-strikes onto the statute book. They hope the French three-strike programme will provide a useful pilot that would provide a strong case for the controversial method for combating online piracy to be introduced elsewhere. Government’s in other countries, including the UK, have expressed reservations about three-strikes, while ISPs maintain it won’t actually work in reducing online piracy because serial file-sharers will find (or already have found) technical ways to avoid detection.
