France Passes Harsh Three-Strikes Legislation, Again

shrik writes "After having it struck down as 'unconstitutional' by the Conseil Constitutionnel once, Sarkozy's controversial 'three-strikes' law (known as HADOPI) was once again passed by the French National Assembly, this time allowing for a judge to order the disconnection (without requiring the presence of the accused party!), thus placating some of the administrative concerns. Opponents say they will 'challenge the law again in front of the Constitutional Council because it deprives the accused of being able to defend themselves properly.' Coverage at Ars also points out a provision that says, 'all Internet users must keep their connections 'secure' and are responsible for what happens on them.'"

Comments

Oh no!

[should_be_linear]

all Internet users must keep their connections "secure" and are responsible for what happens on them

Windows users..... RUN!

Re:Oh no!

[Anonymous Coward]

It also raises the question of whether an organisation becomes responsible for any piracy which occurs as a result of a thirdparty sneaking onto their network. Say, the French government being responsible if a bunch of hackers start downloading pirated material using their network. Wouldn't a judge be obliged to cut that network off immediately?

I wonder if there's a provision

[Duradin]

I wonder if they included a provision that excludes French National Assembly members from the three strikes.

Given enough time any connection can be compromised and if France's script kiddies are like all the others I wouldn't put it past them to pwn a couple of assembly member's connections. Since you are responsible for what happens on your connection...

Sad trend

[Idiomatick]

I LIKE leaving my wrouter unpassworded. I have a resource that costs me nothing it makes good sense to share. My neighbours do the same and are on a different ISP. The result? Near 0 downtime. But it seems this will be legislated away. It depresses me that since I got cable almost 10years ago my speed and capacity has dropped, reliability has dropped massively and is going to take another hit. Capitalism works very well on small individual items but clearly cannot deal with massive projects. Oh well at least its not as bad as cellphones...

Don't get too worked up

[Silentknyght]

It passed, but with a 285-225 vote, there's noticeably significant opposition. And that's just the lower house; it still has to go to a "parliamentary commission of seven senators and seven members of the lower house to pen a final draft that's acceptable to both houses". And that's if it's not blocked by another constitutional appeal.

So, just typical politicking bullshit you'd see across the pond over here, or really anywhere, nowadays, so that Jack can say he was for it and accuse Jane of being against it, to further some hatespeech... er, campaigning. I can't get too worked up until it's actually for real; there's just too much of this nonsense nowadays.

3 strikes on 3 strikes

[JustNiz]

All countries should have a law that prevents their governments from being allowed to repeatedly reattempt to pass a law the got turned down once already. Especially when the law has already been found to be unconstitutional.

I know that sounds appealing

[HangingChad]

Coverage at Ars also points out a provision that says, 'all Internet users must keep their connections "secure" and are responsible for what happens on them.

That sounds great, especially to those of us who have to deal with the Great Unwashed Masses PC problems, but most users are doing good to find the power switch. Making them responsible for what happens to the internals of their PC without their knowledge in a rapidly evolving threat landscape that even security professionals struggle with at times is blaming the victim. It's not their fault Windows is a highly porkable product.

They're teaching young people how to use computers in school but, with few exceptions, they're not teaching them how to use them safely. In many schools it would be the blind leading the blind in security education. Most teachers don't know enough about PC security to make any relevant contribution to solving the bigger problem. Ultimately, it's like trying to fight a fully involved house fire with a garden hose.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I am glad that it's someone else being heavy-handed and dickish for a change.

Secure?

[DoofusOfDeath]

So saying that a connection must be secure immediately raises the question: how secure?

Are they responsible if a neighbor guesses a WEP password and downloads kiddie porn?

Are they responsible if they have a fully patched Windows box, with virus checking, but get compromised by a virus missed by those safeguards and become part of a botnet?

If a criminal breaks into the house while they're on vacation and makes a bunch of purchases with fraudulent credit card numbers, are they still responsible?

We all have broken the law

[xzvf]

Legislatures all over the world pass laws that can't be enforced universally. They are trolling their constituents and trying to look busy to justify having a full time job. The problem is you get huge law books with thousands of obscure laws that have never been tested in court. The police, and by extension the state, can arrest anyone and find a law to justify it. While it might not stick in court yet, being arrested will generally cost you a great deal of money and embarrassment, many employers will fire you with no recourse, it can be used as justification for seizing assets in some cases, etc... Our only protections are the state's lack of interest in us as individuals, or aggressive protesting by the mob if we are visible enough.

Re:We all have broken the law

[MrBandersnatch]

I personally would use the soap and ammo boxes as long range weapons, the ballot box as my preferred melee weapon and the jury box I'd probably class as a weapon of mass destruction. Bloody heavy things though and not that easy to find and carry and to be honest I still prefer the old torch and Molotov for most of my "angry mob" duties, but I admire your attempt to innovate.

My analogy...

[Anita Coney]

So the copyright industry wants you kicked off the net for three mere accusations of copyright infringement. That could be as little as three songs. The songs sell for a buck on Amazon and iTunes. So for a mere three bucks the copyright industry wants you banned from the net for eternity.

Let's imagine a different law. Let's imagine that the banking industry gets fed up with people stealing pens out of their lobbies. These pens are expensive, a buck each. Imagine that a law is enacted stating that any person merely accused by a bank of stealing three pens is banned from the entire banking industry for the rest of his or her life.

Does anyone think such a law has any chance to be passed? Does anyone seriously think that such a law makes sense? Of course it would not and of course it does not. But in the crazy world of copyrights, people actually take the proposed three strikes law seriously.