French law passed to stop illegal downloads
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The new legislation, backed by Frances President, Nicolas Sarkozy, was unexpectedly voted down by the Assembly last month. However, the bill was passed through today.
The bill sets a strict global precedent in cracking down on internet piracy and illegal downs, and is being closely watched by other governments in the UK and US as a potential deterrent. US and UK governments have been looking at ways to help the movie, music and games industries who lose billions of dollars every year through online piracy.
The global music industry has been calling for tougher anti-piracy laws for several years. Since the rise of Peer to Peer networking and torrents, people have become more aware of the accessibility of copyright material.
Game publishers have also fought long a hard to deter piracy, since the age of the Amiga when developers known as 'crackers' would crack a game so that it could be copied from floppy disk to floppy disk. These days developers have become even wiser to the underworld of game downloads.
Three strikes
The new French legislation operates under a "three strikes" system. A new state agency would in the first instance, send illegal file-sharers a pre-warning e-mail, then a formal letter, and finally cut off their ISP connection for a year if they were caught a illegally downloading for a third time.
It has been backed by both the film and record industries worldwide.
But some consumer groups have warned that the wrong people might be punished, should hackers hijack their computers' identity and use it to anonymously download content on their behalf.
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