culture minister

How to help prop up the ailing music industry? Tax Google, suggests a new report commissioned by the French government.

The report, handed to Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand on Wednesday, says Google, Yahoo! and other Internet portals should be slapped with a new tax on their online ad revenues in France to fund the development of legal outlets for buying books, movies and especially music on the Internet.

The proposal is the latest idea to emerge amid France's efforts to fight illegal file-sharing and impose order -- French-style -- on the free-for-all that is the Internet.

Krzysztof Kotarski
When Roman Polański was arrested this weekend, I immediately thought of this.

Krzysztof Kotarski
When Roman Polański was arrested this weekend, I immediately thought of this.

France's lower house of parliament approved a pioneering bill Tuesday allowing authorities to cut off Internet access to people who download illegally, a measure that entertainment companies hope will be a powerful weapon against piracy.

Critics, meanwhile, complain the bill threatens civil liberties, and questions remain about exactly how it will be enforced. The bill has garnered attention beyond France, both from music and film industries struggling to keep up official revenue and from privacy advocates who worry about government intrusion.

President Nicolas Sarkozy's governing party rejoiced when it muscled one of his pet projects through the French parliament: an unprecedented law to cut the Internet connections of people who repeatedly download music and movies illegally.

Sarkozy's victory last week, however, has not won France leadership in Europe's fight against Internet piracy. The government controls needed to enforce the law have unnerved other European nations while legal challenges at home and opposition in the European Parliament could derail it.