Anyone who downloads films and music in France without paying will face up to a year's ban from the internet under a disputed law that is to be approved by the French parliament today.

Hollywood and the music industry are behind President Sarkozy's “three strikes and you're out” scheme for curbing the illegal use of entertainment.

Paul McGuinness, the manager of the Irish band U2, said that the French law, in which rights holders will trace and turn abusers in to the State, set an example in the fight against piracy. “It is equitable and balanced and will work in practice,” he said.

Critics, who include internet and civil liberties groups and some artists, are denouncing it as a breach of freedom that will not work. One internet campaign group called Quadrature du Net said that the law amounted to “imposing a social death sentence”.

They said that it would punish citizens whose internet access is used by their children, employees or people hooking into their wi-fi.

A group of French directors and actors, including Catherine Deneuve and Victoria Abril, published a protest on Tuesday. They urged film lovers to fight a law that was “demagogic, inapplicable and stupidly ignorant of new ways of downloading” creative work.

The Socialist opposition plans to challenge the Creation and Internet Law in the constitutional court but if that fails a state agency will begin tracking down abusers next summer. The agency, known by its acronym Hadopi, will send two e-mail warnings and then a registered letter. If the warnings are ignored Hadopi can impose an internet ban for up to a year.

Mr Sarkozy, who has been encouraged by his wife, Carla Bruni, a singer, said that it would bring order to “the high-tech Wild West where outlaws are pillaging creative work”.

France has one of the worst rates of piracy with a third of internet users admitting to illegal downloading.

American film-makers asked Congress to follow the French example. On Monday Congress heard that $20 billion (£14 billion) of copyrighted entertainment was lost annually to piracy networks.

Opponents of the law, including several MPs from the centre-right party of Mr Sarkozy, said that it was seeking to save an outdated monopoly.

Jacques Attali, the economist who has advised successive French governments, said: “It is absurd, because people no longer download, they stream audio and video ... absurd because it would deprive entire families of internet access ... because real artists have nothing to lose by letting people know their work.”

Some large internet companies are opposed to the law. Google said that a plan by Hadopi to have a label of quality for legal sites that would be given priority in search engine results, contradicted its policies.

End to downloads

— In 2000 the online file-sharing site Napster was sued by the heavy metal band Metallica and the hip-hop artist Dr Dre for copyright infringement. The site settled out of court but faced lawsuits from a coalition of music labels and was declared bankrupt in 2002. It has reappeared as a subscription site

— In 2004 the Motion Picture Association of America, a lobby group representing Hollywood studios, began filing lawsuits against individual hosts of BitTorrent sites that direct users to video downloading sites. In most cases they were successful

— Offices of the highest profile sharing site in the world, The Pirate Bay, were raided in Sweden in 2006 and the company was charged with copyright violation. The verdict on the potentially landmark case is expected this month

Source: Times database

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