This article appeared in  on geek.com December 16th 2011 and was written by Matthew Humphries

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has broken his own 3 strikes piracy rules ..

If you ask most people which country has the strictest rules governing what you can and can’t view on the Internet, the top answer would definitely be China. But if you ask which country has the worst rules relating to online piracy, France would certainly come near the top.

The reason for this is the French government deciding to introduce the three-strikes rules that sees a user banned from the Internet for up to 12 months. A ban is imposed if your ISP detects illegal downloading taking place more than three times, and is preceeded by warnings.

The law was pushed through by Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France. But he has now been found to break the very rules he was so determined to put in place. To be more specific, the IP addresses associated with his home and his office have both been linked to illegal downloads several times.

The source of this information is the newly formed YouHaveDownloaded.com. It was initially thought the service was a joke, but turned out to be far from it. The data they have collected is legitimate, and Sarkozy now has some difficult questions to answer.

Sarkozy’s official residence is the Élysée Palace in Paris, which also houses his office. The IP range covering that location (62.160.71.0 – 62.160.71.255) is shown to have at least six downloads that infringe copyright–that’s double the allowed limit.

Under the rules, Élysée Palace should now go offline for 12 months, but we very much doubt that will happen. We would like to know why Beach Boys music and the movies Tower Heist and Arthur Christmas were pirated though ..

Syl Cotter

DNA IT Solutions