Top French court rips heart out of Sarkozy's internet restrictions
Access to the internet is now "a basic human right" in France!
"France's highest court has inflicted an embarrassing blow to President Sarkozy by cutting the heart out of a law that was supposed to put France in the forefront of the fight against piracy on the internet. The Constitutional Council declared access to the internet to be a basic human right, directly opposing the key points of Mr Sarkozy's law, passed in April, which created the first internet police agency in the democratic world.
The strongly-worded decision means that Mr Sarkozy's scheme has backfired and inadvertently boosted those who defend the free-for-all culture of the web.
Mr Sarkozy and Christine Albanel, his Culture Minister, forced the law through parliament despite misgivings from many of the President's centre-right MPs. It was rejected in its first passage through Parliament.
The law innovated by creating an agency, known by its initials HADOPI, which would track abusers and cut off net access automatically to those who continued to download illicitly after two warnings.
The law was supported by the industry and many artists. They saw it as a model for the USA and Europe in the fight to keep earning a living from their music and film. Net libertarians saw it as the creation of a sinister Big Brother. Many called it technically unworkable. Some artists saw it as hostile to the young consumers who are their main customers.
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4 comments:
Well, it seems true freedom has finally won one! But i doubt this kind of fascist censorship will be coming to the US. That's not to say that the new US govt. isn't engaging in all kinds of fascist tactics to turn the US into a European-style socialist country. Things like nationalizing private corporations. Dictating what type of autos people must drive, and what people can and can not eat. What type of lightbulbs people must use, and on and on. But i doubt they will sensor the internet.
It's not that president Obummer is against censorship. In fact, he and his masters do it every day, but not the internet. No, they have a better way. They will tax it, since an unfair, oppressive tax is not only a form of sensorship, but a new source of revenue.
How do we know our internet isn't already being censored in some way, shape or form?
Censorship? No, but there are worse things than censorship, like "constant monitoring (ie: spying)". The only question is, who's doing it? Just keep this in mind. Whenever we're on the internet, it's big business that's tracking our every move, not the government. It's big business that keeps track of what we do, where we go, what we buy, and what we write. And then some! Your credit card company knows "far more" about you and what you do than the govt. knows, or cares to know.
So now pirates are free to pillage and steal using the internet as their tool of trade, but legitimate companies are forced to remove websites and news items that might upset the French sentiments (a lot of things on the internet are not accessible in France, among them anything that has to do with holocaust denial).
Once again criminals are shown to have more rights than law-abiding citizens.
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