French political elites are pushing through, at home and abroad, the most unscrupulous law project on copyright: HADOPI, which stands for Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Œuvres et la Protection des droits sur Internet (high authority for the distribution of works and the protection of rights on the Internet).[1]

Its other names are "the three strike approach" or the Orwellian "Creation et Internet." State-capitalist Denis Olivennes, the former president of FNAC and head of the group appointed by French President Sarkozy to elaborate the HADOPI project, is highly recommending the spread of this KGB-style solution either to neighboring countries or directly to the European Union. (Europe's budding superstate is meeting some token nationalist resistance, so, for the time being, it is only agreeing to do things the French way when "state security" is threatened — whatever that means.)

A KGB for the Internet?

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History Will Teach Us Nothing — with Special Interests Around

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Error and Aggression

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State capitalists are again playing the externalities card. After, all, who else is going to pay for the adventures of the High Authority if not the taxpayers, and who else is going to profit from its doubtful success if not the older industries?

Where previously we may have had, in the words of Kinsella, "factual ambivalence" on the consequential merits of IP laws in producing more wealth (intellectual or not), new studies show pure stagnation, deserving not ambivalence but censure.[11] In the case of downloads, the great hunt promises to cripple the Internet. And HADOPI is only one of the state's tentacles.

http://www.mises.org/story/3315