France now hangs pirates.(World)

Last month, VideoAge reported that the French Parliament had rejected a bill to suspend Internet connections for pirate usage. Now, just over a month after that initial decision, the same National Assembly has voted in favor of a new version of the bill. Under the more recent initiative, a "three strikes" approach would be taken towards repeat copyright violators who ignored warnings to cease their pirating activities.

The bill has set off a political maelstrom pitting president Nicolas Sarkozy's U.M.P. party against the opposition group, the Socialists, and a number of interest groups which complain that the bill is overly intrusive and would be difficult to enforce. It's thought that the reason the bill didn't make it through last month was due to the absence of members of U.M.P., and that Sarkozy exerted some power to make sure that his party was represented in the new vote. The measure also incited a small scandal involving the termination of the chief of TFI's Web operations, Jerome Bourreau-Guggenheim, who was discovered to have privately criticized the bill in an e-mail to his representative in the National Assembly.

The so-called "three strikes" bill is one of the more aggressive legislation initiatives against digital piracy. Similar legislation has been stalled in the U.S. and rejected in the U.K.

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