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Sunday, January 03, 2010

'Three Strikes' strikes...French law in April Fool's delay

HADOPI should be now in operation, and a board member thinks that 95% of users will stop detectable downloading of copyrighted material after their first 2 letters - i.e. before they are cut off. Its reminiscent of the child porn debate, where the UK ISPs in the Internet Watch Foundation prevented almost all kiddie porn hosted in unencrypted WWW formats on UK servers - but horrors presumably persist on non-UK and encrypted formats.
Europe is of course home to the legend of Don Quixote. The UK parliament is presently debating its new Anti-Digital Windmill Bill...
Michael Geist's blog points to reports that the latest act in the HADOPI tragi-comedy is a further potential 3-month delay (translated from French report):
'Rebound in the last act of the tragi-comedy Hadopi... the National Commission on Informatics and Liberties (CNIL) must give its opinion on any of these decrees... However, December 10, the CNIL decided not to give an opinion, and has sent a letter to that effect. [...]'
'The other option - apparently the most likely - is not to declare war on the CNIL, but to bow to its demands by sending it the draft decree on the procedure. This other text being finalized, could be subject to consultation in January. CNIL will then have two months to give its opinion... Ultimately, the first e-mail warning would be sent to users as early as April. When questioned, the CNIL has confirmed that it had requested access to the decree "procedure".'
Suspicions are raised that Sarkozy doesn't want a HADOPI in the media before the municipal elections in April - a cease-and-desist letter campaign might annoy a lot of parents who are voters...note the UK law also would not take effect until after the General Election.

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