French President Nicolas Sarkozy has announced new plans to tackle online piracy. In a speech today the French president announced that those illegally sharing and copyrighted files could be thrown off the Internet. Sarkozy say that "This is a decisive moment for the future of a civilised Internet.

The new 'Anti-Piracy Body' will give net firms the authority to gather information about what their customers are downloading and if a customer is caught carrying out persistent pirating than this information will be sent to the new independent body dealing with the matters. The new group who is in charge of this new anti-pricay system says that that the measures are to tackle casual piracy rather than big piracy groups.

The information gathered could mean the individual gets a warning to stop but if downloading illegal content continues after this warning could be suspended or even banned from using the Internet.

The arrangement comes after several meetings between Internet firms, record companies, film studios and government officials who came to the conclusion a independent committee needed to be created to deal with online piracy in a more effective manner.

Denis Olivennes who is the head of french electronic store chain FNAC has been quoted as saying that 'penalties for piracy online are completely disproportionate for the people who do file-sharing illegally' he says that rather than heavy fines and threatening jail time they should focus on punishments related to the crime, so he supports the impending actions of Internet use suspensions and monitoring.

However not everyone agrees with the monitoring of the Internet, French consumer group UFC Que Choisir said the actions were " very tough, potentially destructive of freedom, anti-economic and against digital history"

To me this seems like a step back for the advancement of digital freedom for the french, their last form of media that allows completely freedom is being stripped away and this could spread to other countries who's record companies and film makers discover that they too could have the power to force their government's into a corner about enforcing Internet laws and 'online big brother'.

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