A heavily amended version of the bill—which now crucially states that a court ruling must be obtained before anyone can be disconnected—was passed last week through the Senate and was due for debate in the National Assembly today. But C21Media.net reports that despite the embarrassing turnout of UMP MPs at the bill’s last hearing in the Assembly before the Easter holidays, today’s session was canceled because of such a low pre-holiday turnout.

SEE ALSO: France’s Piracy Law In Tatters; MPs Focus Instead On Easter Hols

In any case, there would not have been a vote this week: opposition MPs submitted 900 new amendments, including 747 from Socialist members, leaving them free to filibuster the bill all week until MPs retreat for their summer break. Culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand nevertheless gave the assembly a thunderous speech (via AFP, translation via Google) supporting the bill, calling for culture not to be left “in the gutter of the pirates”.

Looking ahead to when the bill finally is passed, the Ministry of Culture plans for post office subsidiary Extelia to be responsible for processing IP addresses from offending file-sharers as provided by rights holders, collecting user information from ISPs and issuing warnings, as Torrentfreak reports (via Numerama.com). A 10- to 12-month trial with Extelia is due to start in the autumn—and the department expects to send out around 1,000 automatic warnings per day, just a tenth of the total volume of warnings when the project is fully operational.