Since shortly after his election in 2007 – or roughly since his marriage to the singer Carla Bruni – Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, has been on a crusade against the pirating of songs and films, particularly over the internet. Last week, after a bruising legislative battle, he won passage of a law called “Hadopi”, after the anagram of the enforcement agency it establishes. Whether it constitutes a sensible restitution of intellectual property to its rightful owners or a ghastly and vindictive invasion of computer-users’ privacy is a question that has divided France’s political parties.
Hadopi relies on online surveillance by copyright owners – usually film and music companies. It is quite easy, apparently, for these “content providers” to tell when their products are being illegally downloaded over unencrypted peer-to-peer systems such as BitTorrent. When record companies and film producers notice their wares being pirated, they can report the IP address of the offending computer to Hadopi. The illegal user is then required to load spyware on to his computer that will alert Hadopi to further infractions. One more brings a warning. Two bring a ban from the internet of up to a year.
You can see why the music and film industries like this and why others are sceptical. Downloaders can hide in the IP address of an internet café or an office network. New technology is changing to make peer-to-peer downloading less transparent. Corporate snooping opens the door to abuses – and is an abuse in itself. Hadopi exhibits the same misplaced micromanagerial zeal seen in recent trends in British lawmaking, such as anti-social behaviour orders. It is a sort of cyber-Asbo. Le Monde calls the measure “an embarrassment”.
But the practical difficulties are as nothing compared with the assault the law makes on the popular mythology of the unregulated, unfettered internet. The internet is more than a mere appliance, or so the adverts tell us. It is a way of life. It is the space in which 21st-century man lives, loves, shops and socialises. If this is true, then denying someone access to the internet is like sending him into exile. It can cost him his job or his circle of friends. The loss of internet privileges looks like a deprivation of human rights, a response vastly out of proportion to the offence. Publics, too, find the deprivation of internet access unthinkable. Over the winter, New Zealand debated a Hadopi-style law that would restrict internet access. It was dropped in the face of popular opposition.
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