http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/its-baack-french-3-strikes-law-gets-another-go-from-senate.ars
Cool. so a person downloads three songs and can go to jail for two years? or be forced to pay 300K euro?
what's a punishment for shoplifting? if i stole three cds from music store and get caught?

Government does what it can, to protect business interests.
Because business makes jobs, and money! What else do you need?
Gotta keep the wheels of capitalism oiled. If it's not our money, it's our sweat. If it's not our sweat, it's our blood.
[using "our" here as a very general term, inclusive of all those third world workers that produce our cheap consumer goods.]

Well, in fact (french) government does all that the big major companies tell them to do...
Pretty lame when we hear french ministers talking about computers and internet. They don't know a bit about all that, but they decide how it must work. One recent exemple is when they were spiting on open-source applications, saying that OpenOffice and its firewall (yeah...) is a danger and is encouring piracy (right...).
And all this HADOPI law, planning to have an app on your computer which is recording all what you do, and would be the only proof to say "hey, I've not illegaly dowloaded stuff, see HADOPI logs". And in case you don't have installed it and you're accused of illegal download, if you're really honest, you'll be found guilty because you have refused to install HADOPI and can't proove your innoncence...
Oh, and all P2P applications, even if you use them for honest and private sharing, are illegal in France just because you can dowloaded illegal stuff. With this theory, they should make the whole internet illegal...
Don't know well about other countries, but I see hard times for privacy in a near future in France....

The problem is that second sentence of yours "They don't know a bit about all that, but they decide how it must work."
Because they don't know enough (or indeed anything) about what they are doing, they listen to corporate interest groups to tell them what they need to do.
This is almost worse than corruption, because it shows their lack of knowledge, lack of foresight, lack of interest and inability to listen to independant socially minded experts. They allow people with vested interests to dictate the laws of the land.
In this country (UK), we have an amazingly limited copyright law, which even forbids you from ripping a CD that you own onto an MP3 player. Of course they thankfully don't enforce the law in full, otherwise they'd have to hand out fines to millions of people.
Politicians need to look at what the purpose of copyright law is, which should be to boost creative thought by rewarding those who produce new and unique products. This reward is based on their ability to use and distribute said products. For some reason, (Disney is often used as the example), the copyright time-limit was set at the life of the creator plus 70 years (in the US). For some other reason, this was adopted by most western nations as the standard limits.
If you look at patent law, the standard time limit is 20 years. This allows us all to be able to buy cheap aspirin, hayfever medication etc. and is hugely beneficial to poorer people. Those that make drugs for example, still make more than enough money in this 20 years to fund additional research and can never just sit back and take it for granted. Surely the potentially 100+ years of copyright protection is far too high.

I think "three strike" type laws might become a big problem, especially with the growing usage of private, non-secured WLANs, and parents not knowing what their kids do, or heck, not even what they are doing themselves. Most people probably don't have enough knowledge in this subject, and most people can't be bothered to research into it.
That said, I like the copyright laws in Norway. You are allowed to make copy if movies, music and games to close friends or family. Close friends are defined by people whom you meet often, and enjoy company with, on a private basis (as in, outside of school, work etc). It's not allowed copies of those copies again, as that would quite ob(l)viously be illegal.

I figure ilegally downloading music is not the same as shoplifting it from the store. You steal it from the store, YOU get to listen to it and the record company loses $12-20 dollars. You download an ilegal copy and then people download it from your machine and others from their machines and it's a growing snowball until who knows how much money the record company lost to that. Even if you started making copies of your stolen CD and started giving them away, it wouldn't spread as fast as doing it from the internet with a minimum of fuss.
So I guess the big punishment is a deterrent to try and avoid big losses. Not that I think it'll work though. People just always believe they'll never get caught.

Concerning illegal download of music, movies, videgames,etc... I've always wondered what companies though of second hand market. I mean, you buy a second hand CD, you don't pay the company behind it nor the author, and still, you have the CD. Not so different than illegal copy... but it's still legal...

Well, look at videogames with their online activations and account based ownership. They're trying to get rid of it. Second hand is bad for Mr. Money.

As far as I understand it videogame companies hate it, whereas retrailers love it as they see all the profit. In my opinion this move towards more stringent DRM measures such as online activation and account attached direct download services such as Steam is likely more to do with stifling the second-hand market than it is to combat piracy. As far as I can tell piracy seems as rampant as ever but I would imagine used copies of Spore are not exactly in demand.

I'm not really surprised that Sarkozy and his buddies just won't let this thing die. If they do manage to get it passed, however, they'll probably be looking at a showdown with the European Parliament, and possibly the EU Court of Human Rights. The situation is somewhat amusing as well, as despite the push for these laws, Sarkozy and his party aren't too keen on respecting copyright themselves (while the article said the UMP were planning to compensate the artists whose works they infringed last I heard the compensation offer was €1).

Actually AFAIK record company has already been paid for the copy in store so they could not care less about shoplifting. And shoplifting tend to cause more expenses to the store than just money worth of what's been stolen.

Problem with electronic based resales is that it's relatively easy to make a copy of whatever you're selling, so instead of selling your sole copy you can keep the copy and sell the original.
It's not like it's a house or a car where if you sell it, it's gone, no copies no nothing. But for things such as music and video games it's very easy to either copy the music or find a crack for the game.
Not that I find anything wrong with reselling a copy of a game or a copy of a music CD, it's just that it's different from selling anything physical that's used.

I figure its only a few more years before the worlds elected officials are from a generation that actually understands new media and the implications their (government) policy making can have. And actually trying to make good media policy instead of taking notes from business interest =/
Most of the western world has ridiculous media related legislation somewhere in its books, whether it is Australia's internet filter or the french 3 strikes.

Here, read this.