Ah, OK, this is très intéressant. There's a chance that efforts to introduce the controversial three-strike anti-piracy system in France may have fallen at the final hurdle, after the country's Constitutional Council ruled that the new anti-piracy laws passed by the French parliament last month are, erm, unconstitutional.
The Council is France's highest legal body, and any legislation passed by the country's MPs must be approved by it before becoming law. Their job is to check that any new laws do not breach the French people's constitutional rights which, unlike in the UK, can't just be altered by parliament on a whim.
The Council wasn't originally expected to object to France's new Creation And Internet laws which, as previously reported, mean that people who access illegal sources of content online would receive official warning letters from a government department, and then, if they failed to heed those warnings, risk having their internet access cut off. Under the French proposals the new government agency would have the power to force an ISP to cut off an infringer.
However, the proposed disconnection system is not, of course, without controversy. The main issue with the three-strikes proposal is who decides when a file-sharer should be cut off, and what is that file-sharers right to appeal should they feel they have been unfairly accused of copyright theft. That very question has proved a stumbling block in New Zealand where the three-strike system was also passed into law by legislators.
The French proposals, unlike those down under, did consider that question, establishing the aforementioned special government department to manage warning letters and order disconnections (often referred to as the Hadopi). But, for some, a specialist government agency handling disconnections, even if it put in place an efficient appeals procedure for those who felt they had been falsely accused of infringement, is not good enough. Moves are afoot at a European level, for example, to ensure that only a court of law can have the power to stop someone from having internet access (assuming the someone is able and willing to pay for the access, of course).
It's that issue that concerns France's Constitutional Council - not because the new law would potentially breach new European regulations - but because they feel giving a government agency the power to disconnect people from the internet without a court hearing breaches a French citizen's human right to access the internet. They reckon only a French judge in a court of law should be able to instruct an ISP to deprive a user of that right on the grounds of copyright infringement.
It's not clear what the Council's objection to the three-strike component of France's new copyright law now means. The system has the strong support of French President Sarkozy, though the Council's ruling may mean he and his UMP party need to reconsider how their anti-piracy proposals might work, in the context of 'accessing the internet' being a 'human right'. The UMP is yet to respond to yesterday's Council declaration.
The news is also a blow to the music and wider content industries, who have supported the UMP's efforts to crack down on internet pirates, and who had hoped to use the introduction of the three-strike system in France to prove objections to it raised in other territories, by ISPs, politicians and consumer rights groups, are unfounded, allowing stricter online piracy rules elsewhere.