The French authorities seem to be prepared to launch a campaign against the illegal downloaders in the country as they want to stop the distribution of pirated music and videos. According to Financial Times, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to create a special government body which will be responsible for blocking these illegal downloads. But what's more interesting is that the authorities want to remove the access to the Internet for the ones discovered as illegal downloaders. Although some of you might believe this move is way too harsh, it can be pretty efficient as the pirates will be unable to download additional illegal files after they are first detected.

In case you're wondering how they will get the information about the users who download pirated content, it's quite easy to obtain it since the ISPs are able to monitor the entire activity. This way, every time a consumer accesses an application flagged as illegal, the authorities could start an investigation. The targeted applications are obviously the peer-to-peer and file sharing solutions. The copyright holders and the Internet service providers will probably become partners for the government as this move can reduce the pirated content distributed inside the country.

"In exchange for the clampdown on illegal downloading, the music industry has agreed to make individual downloads of archive French material available on all types of players by dropping digital rights management protection," Financial Times added. "The French film industry has agreed to release DVDs more quickly after a film’s first cinema screening, reducing the delay from 7½ months to 6 months."

As far as I can see, this seems to be the most important move made by the French authorities to reduce software piracy and encourage users to download only genuine software, music or movies. However, there are way too many more steps to do until this huge phenomenon stops so let's hope some of the pirates will get scared and will stop distributing pirated content.