Under the proposals, which were published on Tuesday, Ofcom says British ISPs would have to send warning letters to those individuals pinpointed by music, film and TV companies as potential illegal downloaders. Anyone receiving three letters in a 12-month period would then have their personal data, downloading and filesharing history handed over to the copyright owners to help them prepare a legal case.

The rules are largely the same as those previously published by Ofcom in 2010, with some minor alterations. The law will apply to any ISP with more than 400,000 customers, and copyright owners must file their complaints within one month of gathering evidence of illegal activity. Those accused will get 20 days to appeal against the complaint, at a cost of £20 ($31) — which is refunded if the appeal is successful.

Despite the fact that the draft code is being published today, and is expected to be passed into law later this year, the system will not be implemented until March 1, 2014.

It’s already been a long slog for proponents of the law and its opponents. The prospect of a three strikes policy in the U.K. has been hanging over the internet industry for several years, and formed one of the most controversial elements of the Digital Economy Act in 2010.

Since then British internet providers had attempted — and failed — to get the three strikes rules quashed, largely on the grounds of expense. But the move looked inevitable following a court ruling in March.

They have won some concessions, however: under the draft code, rightsholders will meet up to 75 percent of the cost of action, but they will still have to collect and retain significant amounts of data on users.

Gavel photograph: Andrey Burmakin / Shutterstock

The French law with the funny acronym went into effect last year. It resulted in the creation of a large bureaucracy that has sent a reported  755,015 email warnings to those who take copyrighted content without permission. The warnings are supposed to be the first strike in a series of measures that culminate in citizens losing their internet connection — a prospect that has created great alarm but has not actually come to pass.

France’s former government claimed HADOPI reduced piracy by up to 66 percent but others questioned the statistics.

The Socialist party has long promised to revoke the measure altogether and the French press, where HADOPI has been a big deal, has already been speculating about when Hollande will actually kill the law.

In a report on digital issues confronting Hollande, French news magazine L’Express says HADOPI is the most important one and that the new president will implement a revised version of the law by 2013. In the meantime, the report suggests, the existing law’s enforcement measures will soon be suspended.

But at the same time, Hollande is beholden to the country’s powerful cultural interests. He has vowed to fight illegal distribution platforms that “distribute cultural content without participating in their financing.”

Overall, this suggests that the new French government will cease enforcement campaigns against individuals and instead target file-sharing websites as part of a nationalistic cultural campaign. The details — like much of Hollande’s plans for fixing France — have yet to be sketched out.

Meanwhile, the European Commissioner for a digital agenda has expressed discomfort with HADOPI-style punitive measures, and appears focused instead on creating more seamless licensing frameworks for content.

The United States, for now, is poised to go in a different direction with a “six-strike” regime set to go into effect this summer. The scheme is the result of a new collaboration between studios and ISP’s, and would result in a series of warnings and enforcement measures.

At the same time, copyright owners from publishers to porn studios have become more aggressive in using the courts to sue dozens of people at once through “John Doe” lawsuits in which a case goes forward and names are filled in later. Content owners have also been working with federal authorities to seize “rogue” websites.

In the UK, Ofcom has laid out areas that ISPs need to address to make it clearer to consumers how internet traffic is managed on those ISPs’ networks.

They included the requirement that ISPs will need to provide details to users on actual average network speeds, rather than peak speeds at optimal times; disclosure to users about when broadband speed may get intentionally reudced, for example, when a subscriber is using peer-to-peer downloading software (eg, BitTorrent); disclosure about any specific services that might get blocked.

In other words, the kind of information that ISPs should have been giving consumers for years already, but have not.

Although this sounds like bad news for ISPs, I actually think this can only be a good thing: some consumers will not pay attention to these details anyway, but those who do will have more information to make the right choice not about about which internet provider they choose to use, but also clarity on what kinds of services might be more difficult to use, and why.

ISPs should probably get on the case with this so that they can manage their messages well, before the regulator, probably more unflatteringly, does it for them: Ofcom says if ISPs do not start to disclose this information themselves, it will use its powers to “introduce a minimum level of consumer information under the revised European framework” that the UK accepted into law in May 2011.

Interestingly that very same European framework came up in a separate matter this week, when the European Commission named and shamed the 16 member countries that had yet to implement the new framework.

That framework (more details here) covers not only the kind of consumer information on broadband usage that Ofcom is now tackling in the UK, but also requirements for how users can switch mobile operators more quickly and easily, more requirements about safeguarding consumer privacy and details about growing infrastructure, including refarming radio spectrum to use it for wireless services.

The Commission says that it has now embarked on legal proceedings against 16 countries — Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Spain — that have to implement the rules, and will likely fine them for being late, although that can take years to work through the system so is perhaps not too much of a threat to those countries that have yet to do anything.

That list is a mixed bag: it includes both countries that you could classify as “mature” markets for broadband as well as those that are still at an earlier part of their growth and — in the case of some such as Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain — have much more significant economic issues to worry about at the moment. Incidentally, the seven that have approved that framework include the UK, and those European rules are now providing the backbone to the regulations that Ofcom has now set out for UK ISPs.

In truth, it’s not all that surprising to see both France and Belgium on that list. For one, France has enacted some of the most stringent rules in Europe around the prosecution of private users based on their consumption of unlicensed media content, and is actually seeking to extend them. The so-called “Hadopi” law in France is a three-strikes-style system aimed at those who download illegal media files (eg free music or films that have not been licensed by their rights owners), and just the other day French president Nicolas Sarkozy said that he would like those rules extended to users who also stream such content.

Belgium, meanwhile, has been at the center of a heated legal case that people have been likening to the SOPA directives currently making their way through legal hoops in the U.S.

The specific case in question had to do with Belgian ISP Scarlet, which had been sued by Belgian content rights-holding group Sabam for allowing its subscribers to download unlicensed content on its network.

The case has been making its way through the courts for years already, but this now seems to be the definitive ruling: Sabam wanted Scarlet to implement a filtering system to block illegal content; but the court ruled that this would interfere with Scarlet’s business and also violates consumers’ privacy, based on the European directives that are being applied in the UK right now, and are being enforced by the Commission to implement elsewhere.

That seems to put an end to one way for rights holders to go after those who consume unlicensed, free content, but it doesn’t end the discussion altogether. According to the New York Times, the ruling does not affect whether ISPs can outright block certain sites on their network (as long as they tell consumers what they are) — as BT is currently being requested to do over the site Pirate Bay — or for specific violators to be cut off from their internet services (a la Hadopi).

That leaves the door wide open for years more of struggles between consumers, rights owners and broadband providers over the best way of making sure that when a song gets heard, or a film gets downloaded, someone, somewhere gets what’s coming to them.

The agency’s results were reported in Le Monde (original French link) and an English synopsis of the findings was reported by Reporters Without Borders, which has been critical of French anti-piracy efforts. Another analysis was published today by the TorrentFreak blog.

Some key data points from the first nine months of the French anti-piracy campaign:

»  Hadopi, which began operating in October, has tracked the activities of up to 18 million internet users. That massive tracking campaign–combined with a (not yet realized) threat of kicking some users off the net–was enough for Reporters Without Borders to list France as a “country under surveillance” in a recent report on the state of online freedoms. This tracking is done by a company called Trident Media Guard, which had to suspend certain operations after it was hacked in May.

I should note, the 18 million number strikes me as huge. In November 2010, according to a survey by Mediametre, only 37 million French people over the age of 11 were online. This would indicate that almost half of French internet users were using peer-to-peer downloading services.

Update: A commenter below and some other reports have noted that the report actually refers to 18 million file-sharing incidents, not 18 million people engaged in file-sharing.

»  Even though it’s aware of 18 million users engaging in incidents of illegal file-sharing, only a small fraction of those are being followed up on. Trident forwarded 1 million of the suspect IP addresses to French ISPs, which coughed up 900,000 identities of real French internet users.

»  The next step: 470,000 people getting “first warning” emails. But only 20,000 people received second warnings, which may suggest that a simple e-mail warning telling users to essentially “knock it off” is actually a pretty effective tool for combating piracy. Of the 20,000 who got second warnings, only 10 had to receive a third warning. Those ten cases are being handled by a judge. Those users risk a fine of 1,500 euros and could have their internet connection severed–but no such punishments have been meted out yet.