France finally put an end to the most extreme measure of its famous “three strikes” anti-piracy regime: no one will face being cut off from the Internet.

The law is better known by its French acronym, Hadopi. In the last few years under the law, the Hadopi agency famously set up a system with graduating levels of warnings and fines. The threat of being cut off entirely from the Internet was the highest degree, but that penalty was never actually put into place.

“Getting rid of the cut-offs and those damned winged elephants is a good thing. They’re very costly,” Joe McNamee, of European Digital Rights, quipped to Ars.

» via ars technica

A bill in France’s parliament that would allow French universities to increase the number of courses taught in English is running into fierce opposition, the international news channel France 24 reports. Lawmakers have denounced the bill as a signal of France’s “waning influence,” a “humiliation to French speakers,” and a “suicidal project,” with criticism coming even from members of the party of the higher-education minister, Geneviève Fioraso, a Socialist, who introduced the measure.

The bill, offered as a way to raise the country’s profile in international higher education, would allow some university-level classes to be taught in English if they were part of an accord with a foreign institution, or if they had financial backing from the European Union.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

France’s “cultural exception” — the policy that creative works like books, music and movies deserve protection beyond what is accorded ordinary goods — is in line for a digital update.

A government adviser has suggested that manufacturers pay a 1 percent levy on the price of smartphones and tablet computers to help keep funding for such works alive, as more and more end up online and beyond the reach of existing taxes.

The tax, “painless for the consumer,” could also be used to ensure that artists are remunerated at a time when so much is downloaded free, said the report, which was presented Monday to President François Hollande and his culture minister, Aurélie Filippetti.

“Considering the weight of cultural content in connected devices, it is legitimate that those who make and distribute the equipment contribute to the financing of its creation,” according to the report, produced under the guidance of a former television executive and journalist, Pierre Lescure.

» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)

This week at a grand press event the French Publishers Association announced their new anti-piracy portal ProtectionLivres.com. Through the website authors can search for and take down infringing content. An ambitious project, but the publisher group overlooked one small detail – the registration of their website’s domain. This oversight was quickly punished by an eBook pirate group who scooped up the domain to redirect it to an anti-DRM website.

» via TorrentFreak

In a potential test case for Europe, the French government on Monday ordered a big Internet service provider to stop blocking online advertisements, saying the company had no right to edit the contents of the Web for users.

The dispute has turned into a gauge of how France, and perhaps the rest of Europe, will mediate a struggle between telecommunications providers against Internet companies like Google, which generate billions of dollars in revenue from traffic that travels freely on their networks.

European telecommunications companies want a share of that money, saying they need it to finance investments in faster broadband networks — and, as the latest incident shows, they are willing to flex their muscles to get it.

» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)

Xavier Niel, the French technology entrepreneur, has made a career of disrupting the status quo.

Now, he has dared to take on Google and other online advertisers in a battle that puts the Web companies under pressure to use the wealth generated by the ads to help pay for the network pipelines that deliver the content.

Mr. Niel’s telecommunications company, Free, which has an estimated 5.2 million Internet-access users in France, began last week to enable its customers to block Web advertising. The company is updating users’ software with an ad-blocking feature as the default setting.

That move has raised alarm among companies that, like Google, have based their entire business models on providing free content to consumers by festooning Web pages with paid advertisements. Although Google so far has kept largely silent about Free’s challenge, the reaction from the small Web operators who live and die by online ads has been vociferous.

» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)

A French Internet service provider (ISP) with more than 5 million subscribers has taken the unusual step of blocking most web advertising. ISP Free is now blocking most advertisements to subscribers (Français) through an opt-out system; if Free subscribers wish to see web advertising, they will be required to change their router’s settings. Free, one of the country’s most popular ISPs, gained popularity by offering customers an integrated DSL modem/router/digital video recorder in a single set-top box. French website Numerama reports there is no whitelist (Français) for advertisers to bypass the ad blocker.

» via Fast Company

Even as a dispute over Google’s digital book project deepens in the United States, the Internet company said Monday that it had reached an agreement in France that could bring back to life thousands of out-of-print works.

The French Publishers’ Association and the Société des Gens de Lettres, an authors’ group, dropped lawsuits in which they contended that Google’s book-scanning here violated copyright. Google agreed to set up a “framework” agreement under which publishers would be able to offer digital versions of their works for Google to sell.

“Our hope is that these path-breaking partnerships will help jump-start the emerging French electronic book market,” said Philippe Colombet, head of Google Books France. While ebook sales have surged in the United States, they have been held back in France, and across much of Europe, by disputes over rights and other issues.

» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)