On Sunday, French voters will go to the polls to decide whether President Nicolas Sarkozy should return for a second five-year term, or whether his main rival, François Hollande, the head of the Socialist Party, should take the driver's seat in the Elysée Palace. So far, the two men are in a near-dead heat, with Hollande possibly holding a slight edge.

Sarkozy, of course, has championed France's harsh and controversial three-strikes anti-piracy law, known by its French acronym, Hadopi—and even wants to expand its authority and mandate should he be re-elected. The agency responsible for enforcing this law (also called Hadopi), recently came out with a report saying that French Internet users have been decreasing their use of illegal filesharing, even as the French recording industry has seen a drop in revenue.

Not surprisingly, Hollande has positioned himself against Hadopi. In an interview with the French film news website, AlloCiné, the Socialist candidate said that his position on the anti-piracy law was clear.

"[Hadopi] has shown its ineffectiveness and its injustice," he said. "Further, I don't consider piracy to be a minor problem: that's why I'm proposing to replace Hadopi by voting on a law based on Act 2 of the Cultural Exception which will guarantee financing of French cinema and protection of authors' rights. I want to break with destructive simplism that has not solved anything and which has uselessly contributed to separating artists from their audience. There is no simple solution, but a new model to be invented."

This so-called "Act 2 of the Cultural Exception," is a proposal for a new law that Hollande put forward in a January 2012 speech in the northern French city of Nantes. It would be a revision of a 20-year-old provision that France successfully inserted into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), allowing cultural products, such as art, music, film and literature, to be treated differently than other commercial products. Effectively, the "cultural exception" makes it legal for France to maintain its system of quotas and subsidies for its domestic cultural industry.

There's just one problem with Hollande's proposal, says Slate.fr, the French sister site of Slate.

"[Hollande's Act 2] will help fight against illegal sites that make money on the backs of creators, and strengthen legal downloading," Slate.fr reports. "That is exactly what Nicolas Sarkozy has been saying for years. The only difference with the President: the [Socialist] candidate wants to tax Internet service providers (and thus indirectly, households) and Google."

In short, Hollande is against Hadopi-he just wants to replace it with something that sounds an awful lot like it. We hope both for the sake of the French electorate, and for the Internet as a whole, that should Holland get elected, he'll do a better job of explaining what "Act 2" would look like.