The new French 3-strikes law hides a bigger threat

Well it turns out that the French National Assembly has indeed passed the law, even if it was with an almost empty assembly. For those that don’t know about this law – that many other countries are looking at copying – it means that you get three warnings if you or your IP is connected with downloading illegal movie files, music files or other types of files that someone might deem as being copyrighted. On the third warning you lose your access to the Internet – bing bang you’re done.

Now as much as this may suck rotten lemons I noticed something else in the post by John Ozimek of The Register that while it doesn’t affect me it still chilled me to the bone with it’s implications to the French people. John noted that the new law had a future – broader – implication (emphasis is mine)

The law is also referred to as the loi Hadopi, because it creates a “High Authority” (Haute autorité pour la diffusion des œuvres et la protection des droits sur Internet), which will in future be charged with monitoring and regulating the use of the internet in France.

So under the guise of protecting copyrighted works the French government has just created a law that will allow them to completely monitor all Internet activity within France, and I would imagine any traffic coming into the country. Talk about a backdoor trampling of privacy rights.