Senator wants a Belgian Hadopi

Belgian senator Phillipe Monfils has announced plans to propose legislation in the style of the French Hadopi law, reports daily Le Soir. “The idea is to change the behaviour of Internet users by working on prevention,” said Monfils.

He envisages a system of graduated response. File-sharers get a warning, followed by another warning. If the file-sharer does not alter his behaviour, an intervening judge may order to throttle the Internet connection of that user. “So it’s not about terminating someone’s connection, but about limiting their bandwidth.”

On the other side of the Belgian political spectrum (Monfils is member of MR, a centre right party), politicians of the green parties work on a proposal for a global licensing system that would automatically charge Internet users a few euro’s via their ISP. Having paid a license, downloading would be allowed, just like a home-copy fee on data carriers.

An “Internet Observatory”, in the plan of the Greens, has to monitor Internet use to to gather data on downloading and to calculate a fitting fee.

27-01-2010