France looking to extend Hadopi law to cover streaming

Following French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s call for a tightening up of the country’s Hadopi anti-piracy law to cover streaming sites as well as the use of peer-to-peer technology to acquire content illegally, industry minister Eric Besson has said that he will look into means to counter streaming sites that distributed content illegally.

Interviewed on the LCI news channel, Besson admitted that he couldn’t say whether it was technically possible to take effective measures against often foreign-based streaming sites.

Possible measures to combat streaming could include deep packet inspection, seen as highly invasive of the privacy of internet users however, and filtering, currently used to block online gaming sites.

Speaking at the end of last week at the Avignon Forum organised by the French presidency to coincide with the G8-G20 cultural summit, Sarkozy hailed the ‘three strikes’ Hadopi law for reducing peer-to-peer piracy by 35%. However, he said fresh measures would be necessary to combat streaming sites.

Sarkozy also announced the creation of a National Music Council (CNM) on the model of the current Centre National du Cinéma (CNC), to support the French music industry, using funding from a tax on internet subscriptions. The announcement has met with a hostile reaction from the country’s ISPs.