French battle back on restrictive HADOPI copyright law

Liberty, equality, fraternity... money? France's National Assembly has tossed out the HADOPI bill approved late in the night last week by 16 members of France's Senate. The bill, amended, is apt to be re-introduced later in 2009.

The sticking point on Thursday for the "Creation and Internet Law," known as HADOPI after its French acronym (la Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Oeuvres et la Protection des Droits sur Internet), wasn't its notorious graduated-response / "three strikes" aspect, which states that after three accusations of piracy the government may take away an accused person's Internet access for up to a year.

Nor was it the lack of judicial process for managing accusations. As the law currently stands, there is still no appeals process for addressing piracy accusations, nor substantial burden of proof on accusers to show that the alleged piracy was committed by the person whose account is to be cut off. (That may yet cause trouble from HADOPI in the broader EU community. The European Parliament has already in fact asked for an amendment forbidding the suspension of Internet access, and has voted three times against the "graduated response" as set forth in the bill.)

No, the final straw apparently concerned money. An amendment to HADOPI would have required that users cut off from the Internet under the three-"strikes" rule continue to pay their ISP for Internet access. Even in a nation of Jerry Lewis fandom, some ideas are simply too silly to tolerate; Assembly members previously friendly to the legislation changed their votes, and the bill fell by a vote of 21-15.

The defeat was followed quickly by calls from members of the Socialist Party, which has undertaken a sustained attack against HADOPI, to concede defeat and drop the whole thing. That's not likely. According to Numerama, which has been following HADOPI closely, a revised version of the bill might be introduced as soon as the end of the month.