ratel - 3:17 pm on Mar 11, 2009 (gmt 0)

For the UE debate, check-out the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs [europarl.europa.eu] commission of the European Parliament, which assumes the leading role in it.
The current hotspot is France, with the "Creation & Internet" bill of law starting discussion today, mainly. (But not only, as the government as been pushing those last weeks for imposing white-list filtering on public wifi access points, among other things, like suggesting Google should rank legit or approved -by French governmental agencies - pages higher than unapproved ones; you can guess how this one was received by Google France.)
To make it short, the "Creation & Internet" law would set up an administrative body which, upon request by IFPI representatives (to whom is recognized the right and given the power to spy on the network), would order the ISPs to cut-off and blacklist the legal users of an IP to which has been illegally downloaded copyrighted materials. The sanctionned misdeameanor is not illegal downloading, but not having made it impossible to use that IP for downloading. Charge of the proof lies on the accused party; it is receivable if that party has installed approved close-source spyware and can produce its logs. As this is an administrative and not judiciary action, appeal does not suspend the sanction, nor does the sanction extinguish judiciary prosecution for the same acts.
No, I'm not joking... You can check [numerama.com ] if your french is not too rusty.
Sorry for the long post and hesitant english.