France has announced a harsh new penalty for the worst illegal downloaders: the loss of Internet privileges for up to a year.

Under the law, three-strike illegal downloaders (those who habitually download movies, music, and TV shows) can have their internet shut off by the French government for a period of up to a year, making France one of the few countries really going after illegal downloaders. The laws will be enforced by a new downloading police agency, and French companies have agreed to remove copyright protection so that MP3s and videos can be played on all devices, which would make videos and music bought legally playable on every device a person owns.

There are some flaws in the plan however; the law is targeted at the people who own the Internet routers, not the individual downloaders per se. As a French paper, Liberation, noted, if a teenager downloads music from a neighbor’s router, he is not the one who will be prosecuted under the law.

Whether this law will actually get people to stop downloading illegally (or if it will make the leap to other countries) is yet to be seen, but it is the boldest move thus far in the war on downloading. [Times U.K. Online]