Here in the United States, five major ISPs nationwide are rolling out the Copyright Alert System, aka the “six strikes” plan. Verizon became the latest to join the fun, alerting its customers on Wednesday of the new rules.

But across the pond, there are changes afoot in what is perhaps the world’s harshest and best-known three strikes online copyright monitoring system: France’s Hadopi.

The French government’s anti-piracy agency announced Monday (Google Translate) in a new report (French, PDF) that it wants to go even further. Hadopi (or another related government body) wants to expand the mandate to specifically target streaming and direct download sites. The report proposes a number of changes to the French enforcement regime that could clamp down further on sites violating intellectual property online.

As we’ve reported before, Hadopi has been controversial to say the least. Last fall, the anti-piracy agency successfully prosecuted the sole case to date that reached the third strike. The ridiculous result? A man—whose soon-to-be-ex-wife admitted (under oath!) that she actually downloaded two unauthorized Rihanna songs—was fined nearly $200.

“Unavoidable collateral damage to freedom of expression”

How would this new system work? It would require all sites to follow the example of YouTube and Dailymotion, engaging in proactive filtering, content recognition, and fingerprinting provided by copyright holders. (As we’ve pointed out, such systems are far from perfect—recall the recent example of Germans being unable to watch Russian meteorite videos on YouTube as a result of a copyright dispute.)

“In the event that it would not be possible to reach an agreement due to an apparent unwillingness of the host [to address the content in question], the public authority may decide to publicize the host’s behavior under the alert procedure given below,” the report states.

In short, sites that don’t comply with this government-imposed pre-emptive agreement could find themselves on the business end of a French three-strikes-style warning. The results could end in a domain name seizure or DNS and IP blocking.

The report also states that there could be new financial penalties.

In parallel [to other measures], and to encourage self-regulation initiatives, payment intermediaries should receive immunity for their cooperation [if they] suspend contractual relations [with the site in question] as a result of the proposed alert procedure. In the event that financial intermediaries do not [respond to] alert procedures and engage in the self-regulatory initiatives, a judge or the public authority, in a manner to be determined to preserve the balance of interests, could force payment intermediaries to temporarily suspend their contractual relations, under certain conditions, with sites that have been subject to a warning procedure.

The French tech news site Numérama summed up (Google Translate) the proposal in one word: blackmail. The Paris-based Internet advocacy organization, La Quadrature du Net, has compared this new proposal to the defeated ACTA and SOPA measures.

“Currently confined to the fight against file sharing between individuals, Hadopi now wants to extend its control to Internet intermediaries such as hosting services, search engines, Internet service providers, or online payment services,” the organization wrote in a statement on Wednesday.

“Doing so could only lead them to actively monitor content shared on the Net, with unavoidable collateral damage to freedom of expression, the protection of privacy, and the right to a fair trial.”