French Net Censorship Plan Moves Forward

angry tapir writes "French lawmakers have voted to approve a draft law to filter Internet traffic that Slashdot previously discussed. The government says the measure is intended to catch child pornographers. The Senate, where the government has a majority, will soon give the bill a second reading. If the Senate makes no amendments to the text, that will also be its final reading, as the government has declared the bill 'urgent,' a procedural move that reduces the usual cycle of four readings to two."

Comments

Re:Germany's net censorship law took the last hurd

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but with all five political parties in the bundestag against the law, it is pretty likely that it will 1) never be enforced 2) get cancelled eventually

Because of the elections

[kemenaran]

The "urgent" status is actually because this censorship bill is part of a larger law, named LOPPSI 2, that addresses several "security" matters : more jail for everyone, Internet filtering, trojans for cops in "organized crime" investigation, and so on.

There are regional elections in France in about one month. The government tries to scare people on security matters — the good old "I want *everyone* to *remember* _why_they_need_us_ !". They want to pass the law before the elections, and gave it an "urgent" status that of course isn't justified in any other way.

Re:Bon chance!

[FriendlyLurker]

The fallacy here is that this measure will do nothing.
I wish I could say otherwise, but you're wrong about that. It will do nothing to stop the production or spread of child pornography, but it will constitute another erosion of freedom of speech or information.

I wish I could say otherwise, but even this is not entirely correct. The measure will actually HELP the spread of child pornography.
It's pretty simple really:
1) Net censorship will eventually of course mean less access to "illegal" information. For example access to information deemed illegal at sites like Wikileaks.
2) Without widespread access to "illegal" information such as the illegal ACTA leaks, there will be little to no organized resistance to the ever-tightening Copyright and IP laws and treaties being signed (ACTA, GATS, TRIPS etc)
3) Strict IP and copyright laws keep third world countries poor [1]. The majority of Child Pornography stems from human trafficking from third world countries, an unfortunate risk of growing up in a third world country [2].
...

If the French Government really cared about Child Pornography, it would be taking studies like [1] below seriously and not playing cloak and dagger with treaties like ACTA.

[1]

Commission on Intellectual Property Rights declared the internationally-mandated expansion of intellectual property (IP) rights unlikely to generate significant benefits for most developing countries and likely to impose costs, such as higher priced medicines or seeds. This makes poverty reduction more difficult. The intensively researched, 180-page report is entitled Integrating Intellectual Property Rights and Development Policy. It is the culmination of much study and follows on more than a dozen meetings and workshops, 17 working papers, an exhaustive literature review of the field, visits to several developed and developing nations and a major conference. The report makes some 50 recommendations aimed at aligning IP protection with the goal of reducing poverty in developing nations. Topics include IP and health; agriculture; traditional knowledge; copyrights, software and the Internet; and the role of WTO and WIPO in advancing developing country interests. The Commission is an independent international body made up of Commissioners from both developed and developing countries with expertise in science, law, ethics and economics. The Commissioners come from industry, government and academia* (see list of Commissioners below). "Developed countries often proceed on the assumption that what is good for them is likely to be good for developing countries," said Professor John Barton, Commission Chair and George E. Osborne Professor of Law, Stanford University. "But, in the case of developing countries, more and stronger protection is not necessarily better. Developing countries should not be encouraged or coerced into adopting stronger IP rights without regard to the impact this has on their development and poor people. They should be allowed to adopt appropriate rights regimes, not necessarily the most protective ones."

http://www.biotech-info.net/independent_commission.html

[2] Third world are the major "Source Countries" of child pornography and other human trafficking related crimes.

Re:Bon chance!

[DrSkwid]

And the terrible fact that web based CP is not how it's distributed any more, paid for cp is done through virtualisation connected to via encrypted VPN. These laws are ridiculously out of date / lies.