France

The French government is counting the cost of having copyright enforcement shifted from the corporate to the public sector – and it’s not pleased at what it sees.

Hadopi, the body charged with hunting down freetards under France’s three-strikes law, has sent a million warning e-mails and 99,000 registered letters. This seemingly-impressive pursuit of Internet evildoers has, however, resulted in a scant 134 cases being examined for prosecution – and so far, zero cases have been escalated to the point where an Internet user has been disconnected.

AN ONLINE French t-shirt supplier has taken on the might of the Anonymous hacking group by legally registering the outlaw group's logo and slogan as its own.

The supplier registered the Anonymous flagship identifiers with France's National Institute of Industrial Property and according to Anonymous, the registration has been granted.

French tax authorities have visited the headquarters of Microsoft France to conduct an inspection, a spokesman for the company confirmed Wednesday.

The visit, last Thursday, was a routine check, according to a statement on the company's website.

When I was in high school in the mid-1990s, I got to spend a few weeks with my French extended family at their country house east of Paris. Nearly each night, I watched my uncle stare into a small, old, dusty computer to monitor the results of the Tour de France. The little beige box had a fold-down keyboard and a pretty old-school text-only interface, even by mid-'90s standards. This was a Minitel.

Founded in 2006 by a group of Swedes close to the Pirate Bay illegal download website, the Pirate Party has spread across Europe. The Pirates are the spiritual heirs of the libertarian hackers from the late 20th century, who dreamed of a free circulation of culture and knowledge on the Internet.

France's three-strikes anti-piracy law is one of the strictest in the world. It employs private companies to scan file-sharing networks for copyright infringement and sends warnings to pirates if they're caught red-handed. The law, enforced by a French authority called Hadopi, was instated 17 months ago to the applause of music copyright holders and their representatives.

Identity theft is a growing issue in many countries with 80,000 cases per year in France alone, according to the French Interior Ministry. For this reason the French National Assembly has decided to vote on the new law on identity protection.

The new French smart ID card is supposed to protect against identity theft and offers a new way to interact with administration services. However, to open a digital world for French citizens, the Government has to focus on smart card readers’ deployment.