French 3 strikes law declared unconstitutional
By Paul Biba
Here’s the scoop from the site with the best logo in the world, The Register:
France’s constitutional court today deemed the Hadopi law illegal … The Court found several parts of Hadopi unconstitutional, violating the citizen’s right to free speech, and the presumption of innocence. The Hadopi authority also failed to possess sufficient legal status to carry out its job, Judges concluded.
"Freedom of expression and communication is all the more valuable that its exercise is a prerequisite for democracy and one of the guarantees of respect for other rights and freedoms and that attacks on the exercise of this freedom must be necessary, appropriate and proportionate to the aim pursued," they wrote.
The breadth of the finding effectively guts the law - so it’s back to square one for copyright enforcement in France. …
See, also, this article from the Open Rights Group.
June 11th, 2009 at 12:09 am
This is excellent. I have been saying Free Speech trumps copyright for years, but it is nice to have a court affirm that point of view.
So, is Big Media currently the largest threat to Free Speech? The French constitutional court seems to think so — and that carries a lot of weight since most of this “intellectual property” nonsense was in no small part a product of their revolution and cultural background. It is nice to see France repair a little of the damage it has done to Freedom world wide.