Rich Fiscus
24 Feb 2009 12:05
France's 3 strikes law for P2P copyright infringers may be close to passage in the Fench National Assembly. Lawmakers are currently working on a final draft that should be ready for a vote some time next month according to a story from Intellectual Property Watch.
First proposed by President Nicholas Sarkozy in November of 2007, it would create a new government agency where copyright holders could take infringement claims. That agency would send written warnings for the first two offenses, followed by an order to terminate internet service on the third.
While certainly better than recording industry proposals, which have generally left any governmental controls out of the equation, this law would still raise serious legal issues. Perhaps the biggest is how such a decision can be reached with no judicial oversight.
In addition there are questions about whether internet service should be classified as a necessity, which would make it unlikely such a law would pass legal muster.
And of course there's the fact that even identifying the subscriber a particular IP address was assigned to at a spcific time is unreliable at best.