Controversial “Internet and creation” French law

I wasn’t sure to really understand this project of law until I read a lot about it during the past days. As some of you might already know, this law, called “Internet et Création”, but mainly referred as “HADOPI” law ¹, is a “Three Strikes” scheme to fight against illegal downloads proposed before the last summer by the French government, and then voted in the Autumn by the Sénat (the first of the two French houses of Parliament).

Not that I am in favor of illegal downloads of movies and music, but the way this law plans to fight against them is a real threat for French free software developers and users.

I won’t explain here all the details of this law, but to sum up, it plans to suspend the Internet access to people downloading illegal files from the peer-to-peer network, after 2 notices. Here are the problems I have noticed, as far as I am personally concerned, besides more general aspects this law implies (user freedom etc.):

• Some private actors, indirectly working for French leisure and cultural companies, will be in charge of controlling the French Internet. They will only base their accusations on the IP addresses, which I do not think to be a proof alone.
• An Internet user, accused to have illegally downloaded movies or music will have to prove by his own means he has not done it – ie. his Internet connection could have been hacked, but he needs to prove it! This is totally contrary to the way justice normally works in France, where you are supposed to be innocent until the contrary is proved. A large majority of French Internet users do not have the necessary technical skills to secure their wireless network and hence their Internet connection. And even with good skills, all of them do not own a wireless router supporting eg. WPA2, which creates a real discrimination towards French Internet users.
• A chapter of the project of law plans the possibility to set up a kind of firewall on the computers connected to the Internet – they will allow Internet users to prove their sincerity. This causes however a big issue for free software users: I doubt such a piece of software will be available for free operating systems (such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD etc.). Even if it is, it won’t be opensource – if it was, anybody could amend it and/or disable it, hence no real possibility for the user to prove it was running when the illegal download was noticed.
• This law doesn’t take into account the fact that an increasing part of the peer-to-peer exchanges are encrypted, or run anonymously. More over, other technical ways of downloading are not considered (streaming, direct downloads especially when the websites are hosted abroad).

The law should be discussed at the Assemblée Nationale from today (the second house of Parliament), I hence contacted my local representative last week in order to propose a meeting allowing me to expose my concerns. Until now, I have received no answer, despite the fact he accepted to commit in favor of free software when running for being re-elected in june 2007 (he signed the “Pacte des logiciels libres” from the APRIL association). I guess I will receive an answer once the law is voted!