Will France Spy on You?

Apparently France has some new legislation surrounding pirated software. I applaud reasonable approaches to combating piracy, but it appears that France may be ready to make public the answer to the question “Will Anti-virus ignore government Trojan horse programs?”
I first saw the story at http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/08/05/152255/Tech-Specs-Leaked-For-French-Spyware and the story was picked up from http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100804/04205910492.shtml. If this is true it could pit the rest of the European Union and virtually the entire antivirus industry against France.
Hadopi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law refers to both the High Authority for Copyright Protection and Dissemination of Works on the Internet legislation and the French governmental organization tasked with enforcing France’s new law. Already most of the European Union has indicated that they feel the law violates the EU constitution. The technical specifications of a plan to enforce the Hadopi law were leaked and appear to call out for software, that most reasonable people would call spyware, to be installed upon the computers of French Citizens.
From an antivirus perspective this is a very thorny issue. France certainly lacks the right to mandate their software is installed on any computers outside of France and the customers of antivirus companies will certainly want to know if someone is attempting to install this “spyware” on their computer. Detection of the program will almost certainly be universal and it is unlikely that antivirus companies are going to (continue reading...)