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Anyone who persists in illicit downloading of music or films will be barred from broadband access under a controversial new law that makes France a pioneer in combating internet piracy.

“There is no reason that the internet should be a lawless zone,” President Sarkozy told his Cabinet yesterday as it endorsed the “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” scheme that from next January will hit illegal downloaders where it hurts.

Under a cross-industry agreement, internet service providers (ISPs) must cut off access for up to a year for third-time offenders.

In a classical French approach the scheme will be enforced by a new £15 million a year state agency, to be called Hadopi (high authority for copyright protection and dissemination of works on the internet).

The law has strong backing from Mr Sarkozy, who has taken a close interest in artists’ rights since marrying Carla Bruni, a model and folk singer. However, it has run into opposition from a range of bodies including the state data protection agency, consumer and civil liberties groups and the European Parliament. Big web companies, including Google, and Dailymotion, the video-sharing firm, refused to sign up to the 40-member industry accord last November.

Mocking the scheme yesterday Libération newspaper gave warning that families could be stripped of their internet and broadband telephone and television if a neighbour’s teenager uses their wireless router to load his iPod.

Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister, who is responsible for the creation- and-internet law, said that it will replace criminal action with dissuasion. “It takes a preventive and educational approach,” she said. Over the past two years French courts have convicted 300 people for piracy, most of them professionals and none of them minors. The prosecutions have had little impact on the sales of a recording industry in steep decline.

Under the accord, the entertainment industry will also drop existing copyright protection on French material so that music or videos bought legally online can be played on any sort of device. The industry has hailed the French scheme as a model for the EU, which is losing hundreds of millions of pounds a year to illicit sharing of films and music. “This is the most important initiative to help win the war on online piracy that we have seen,” John Kennedy, head of the IFPI, the worldwide recording industry body, said.

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