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"I think we should permanently cut off the internet access of any company that sends out three erroneous copyright notices. Three strikes and you're out, mate."

The whole proposal is worth reading. But we think Prof. Felten hasn't gone far enough. As Cory Doctorow has suggested, this wonderful idea should also be applied to corporations -- if the Walt Disney Company is accused of copyright infringement 3 times, it should also be banned from the Internet, don't you think?

"This [three-strikes law] is such a good idea that it should be applied to other media as well. Here is my modest proposal to extend three-strikes to the medium of print, that is, to words on paper. My proposed system is simplicity itself. The government sets up a registry of accused infringers. Anybody can send a complaint to the registry, asserting that someone is infringing their copyright in the print medium. If the government registry receives three complaints about a person, that person is banned for a year from using print. As in the Internet case, the ban applies to both reading and writing, and to all uses of print, including informal ones. In short, a banned person may not write or read anything for a year."

We found it rather ironic that, just as French President Nicolas Sarkozy was so adamant about passing a three strikes law to kick file sharers off the internet, he was being accused of copyright infringement himself, specifically for using music from the US band MGMT at an event and in two online videos without securing a license. Now, you might hope that this would cause Sarkozy to rethink his stance on copyright infringement. Instead, it looks like his political party has simply agreed to pay up and make the issue go away, while still pushing for the three strikes law. It sounds like they paid about 30,000 euros, which is a lot more than the single euro that Sarkozy's party initially offered (yes, seriously). No word on whether or not this counts towards the number of strikes on Sarkozy's internet connection.

April 22, 2009: TAIPEI, Taiwan -- The Legislative Yuan ratified yesterday the latest revision of the Copyright Law to empower Internet service providers (ISPs) to "strike out" Internet surfers who have violated others' copyrights and posted unauthorized content on any Web sites.