The EU created the equivalent of the US's DMCA called the EU Copyright Directive or EUCD a few years ago, but left it up to individual member states to enact the relevant legislation to implement it. France has taken until now to implement it and its legislation goes further than that demanded by the EUCD itself. A website (English) has been set up to coordinate opposition to it since it seems that the French legislation is likely to have a considerable number of unexpected consequences if enacted as currently proposed.

Of course it will depend on precisely how the law is enforced but as I read it, services such as Skype will be illegal because Skype allows files to be transfered from one computer to another securely as will secure email services such as POP-SSL and, for that matter, HTTPS downloading. In fact it would seem to me that this law will in fact mandate that all French ISPs implement draconian firewalls and proxies that will closely resemble those of states such as Saudi Arabia or the People's Republic of China in order to ensure that no copyright files are transfered.

Another effect will be the stifling of a good deal of French innovation as the way the law is written much open source programming will become effectively illegal. I do not know precisely how many French entrepreneurs have startups that are based at least in part on open source code but it would seem to me that all these startups will have to rethink their usage of Open Source and hence potentially their entire business model.