The French legislature today passed into law a second version of the ultra-controversial HADOPI “three strikes” law that targets illegal Internet file-swappers. The revised proposal does address the concerns of the “Sages” who sit on France’s Constitutional Council who objected to the first version of the law, but it does little to mollify critics. Internet disconnections of up to a year can be ordered by a single judge in a “streamlined” proceeding, while Internet users who fail to “secure” their connections can also be punished if other people use those connections to exchange copyrighted material.

The National Assembly passed HADOPI 2 today by a margin of 285-225; the Senate has already passed the legislation.

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Last Friday, the deadline passed for formal comments from parties interested in the Google Book Settlement, but the flow of less-formal comments doesn’t seem to have abated. The settlement would turn the search giant into the gatekeeper for out-of-print books, and a variety of groups have now expressed concern for the sweeping changes it would allegedly make to the management of copyrights. This week, however, the focus has shifted to Europe, where Google has faced opposition from France and Germany that has prompted it to offer some concessions to local publishers.

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Fresh off a set of legal wins against The Pirate Bay, the music and movie industries have just scored another court victory against the massive BitTorrent search engine Mininova. A Dutch judge in Utrecht has given Mininova three months to purge all links to copyrighted content from its site—or pay up to €5 million in penalties.

As with The Pirate Bay, Mininova’s operators weren’t accused of copyright infringement. In a peer-to-peer system, the actual files being transferred reside on millions of computers around the globe, and thus any direct infringement would be the responsibility of those users. But, like most countries, the Netherlands recognizes “contributory copyright infringement,” which was the charge in this case.

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Whether you’re searching for a storefront in a strange neighborhood or drunks passed out on the curb, Google Street View can be an extremely helpful tool. Street View has drawn its share of critics, however, and we can now add the government of Switzerland to that list. Just days after launching Street View in Portugal, Switzerland, and Taiwan, the search giant has been told by the Swiss Government that it needs to yank the Street View from its Swiss maps, a development that has left the search giant “surprised.”

Hanspeter Thür, the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC), has accused Google of not having taken the necessary steps to safeguard the privacy of Swiss citizens. Thür has demanded that “Google Inc. immediately withdraw its online service Google Street View concerning Switzerland,” according to a statement.

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We haven’t read the World Trade Organization’s big ruling, handed down Wednesday, ordering China to be stop forcing U.S. companies to deal with the Chinese government when they want to distribute their copyrighted works. The ruling is 460 pages (460 pages!?). Maybe, if the action from Hazeltine proves less than entirely compelling this weekend, we’ll digest it and get back it to you. For now, LBers, you’ll have to deal with our shiftlessness and accept our news-coverage roundup.

The dealio: The ruling, according to the WSJ, represents a stinging blow to China — “it’s biggest defeat yet” — in the long-running battle over how American books, movies and music are distributed in China. According to the WSJ, the ruling could help break open the tight controls that have crippled the ability of filmmakers, musicians, videogame designers and other artists to widely market their creations at reasonable prices. Click here for the NYT article;

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By Stephen Leahy*
VIENNA, Jul 6 (Tierramérica)
Indigenous peoples risk losing control over their traditional knowledge if the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) insists on strict standards for managing access to information.

Patents and other forms of restricting access to knowledge are very worrisome in a time of climate change, says a new report by the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

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In 2008, the Canadian government discovered a new “third rail” of politics: copyright reform. Long considered a wonky subject of interest only to legislators and rightsholders, interest in copyright has exploded in recent years, and Canadians showed a keen interest in talking about term length, time shifting, DRM circumvention rules, format shifting, mashups, remixes, the public domain, and the levies that Canadians currently pay on things like blank CD-Rs.

When Bill C-61 was introduced in June 2008, though, it was instantly clear that consensus would be hard to find. Consumers wanted rights and flexibility, while copyright holders wanted… well, I’ll let them explain it.

“We would be deeply concerned if the Bill allows people to copy artists’ work onto media devices like iPODS without compensation for creators; and, also if existing levies and royalties are affected by this Bill,” said Brad Keenan, Director of the Performers’ Rights Society and Sound Recording Division at the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA).

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As Google grows, so too does the list of legal scrapes it’s gotten itself into — with antitrust and copyright issues rising to the top of the docket in recent days. But the company can breathe a little easier in one area — U.K.-centered libel issues — after the British High Court ruled last Friday that that Google isn’t responsible for defamatory material trawled by its search engine. Click here and here for the WSJ and NYT stories, respectively.

Justice David Eady ruled that Google’s Internet search engine isn’t considered a publisher under defamation law, and therefore isn’t responsible for the content of the short descriptions of Web sites that appear in Google searches.

The case was initiated by Metropolitan International Schools Ltd., an online training company based in the U.K. The company had sued Google over comments posted on Web forums accusing the training company of running a scam, an allegation Metropolitan International Schools denied, according to the judgment.

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