What do they mean by "...cannot be commercially exploited?" Would a for-profit corporation be violating copyright just by viewing it? What are the punishments for "commercial exploit[ation]"?
The translation is not good, so a "shorter" version:
1. If you publish your research work in a journal and the research work has been financed for at least 50% by public institutions, you can provide on the web for free your paper too (if the coauthors agree). You are allowed to put it online directly if the journal is a free/open access journal or after 6 to 12 months.
2. A publisher cannot prevent you to do that.
3. You cannot use these available papers to make money out of them with a service similar to a publisher "une activité d'édition à caractère commercial". Basically, to prevent competition with the original publisher. So, you cannot create a big website with both the papers and advertising.
If you are a company getting access to the paper through the university website or the website of the author, this is fine. Wikipedia could start collecting and make the papers available too.
Punishments will be set by a judge according to the French civil law on copyrights I suppose.
Not directly, but wouldn't it open up a box of issues where publishers make it harder for authors who distribute their papers for free to get published the next time around?
Not in the way the current system works because the publishers are doing nothing, they are just taking the papers as reviewed by the committee as-is.
In fact, with this law, we are most likely going to see is that the universities will automatically hook into something like: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/
When you submit a paper to a journal, your university normally request that you submit your paper to the internal university store. This store will then automatically push your paper to this open access library after X months.
If this moves this way, publishers would have to say: French researchers cannot publish with us any more....
Despite the unclear wording, the intention here is clearly to protect the commercial publisher who is otherwise being harmed by this law (the author usually gives some exclusive distribution rights to the publisher and this law changes that by declaring this exclusivity void and mandating open access, perhaps via a parallel publishing channel).
1. If you publish your research work in a journal and the research work has been financed for at least 50% by public institutions, you can provide on the web for free your paper too (if the coauthors agree). You are allowed to put it online directly if the journal is a free/open access journal or after 6 to 12 months.
2. A publisher cannot prevent you to do that.
3. You cannot use these available papers to make money out of them with a service similar to a publisher "une activité d'édition à caractère commercial". Basically, to prevent competition with the original publisher. So, you cannot create a big website with both the papers and advertising.
If you are a company getting access to the paper through the university website or the website of the author, this is fine. Wikipedia could start collecting and make the papers available too.
Punishments will be set by a judge according to the French civil law on copyrights I suppose.