It already failed to pass once. Then, it was then struck down by the French Constitutional Council. The final vote fell along strictly partisan lines, and even so, 40 or so of his own deputies voted against it. Yet in spite of it all, last week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy finally succeeded in passing an amended version of the much maligned and, many say, fundamentally flawed anti-illegal downloading bill, known as the loi Hadopi. Whether this is a tribute to the tenacity or to the obstinacy of the French leadership is unclear. […]
“There must be ten different ways of explaining how obsolete, inefficient and dangerous it will be,” Jeremie Zimmermann, co-founder of the internet advocacy group La Quadrature du Net, told The Faster Times. “The most disturbing part is that there is a good chance people punished by this law will be innocent.” Indeed, listening to Mr. Zimmermann, you start to wonder if the drafters of the law even understand how the Internet actually works. […]
http://thefastertimes.com/westerneurope/2009/09/19/illegal-downloading-just-got-illegal-er/