Last night, the French parliament passed an amendment affirming the legality of free movie and music filesharing:
If the amendment survives, France would be the first country to legalize so called peer-to-peer downloading, said Jean-Baptiste Soufron, legal counsel to the Association of Audionautes, a French group that defends people accused of improperly sharing music files.
The law would be a blow to media companies that increasingly use the courts worldwide to sue people for downloading or sharing music and movie files. Entertainment companies such as Walt Disney Co., Viacom Inc. and News Corp.'s Fox say free downloading of unauthorized copies of TV shows and movies before they are released on DVD will cost them $5 billion in revenue this year.
(…) The amendment, which is attached to a bill on intellectual property rights, states that "authors cannot forbid the reproduction of works that are made on any format from an online communications service when they are intended to be used privately" and not for commercial use.
Link to Bloomberg story (Thanks, John Frost)
I time-warped to the secluded mountain resort where my co-editor Cory Doctorow is holidaying, and asked him for his take on this news. Cory crawled out of a snowdrift just long enough to say:
Here's what I think's going on with P2P thing in France:
The French govt has been captured and is on the way to passing a terrible French copyright law that will implement the provisions in the EUCD (the Directive that was given rise to through accession to the WIPO Copyright Treaty, the same treaty that created the US DMCA).
The French EUCD is really bad: bans open source, requires mandatory universal wiretapping, etc. Making matters worse, the govt called its hearings on this for Dec 22/23, when no one would be around to make a stink.So the French Parliament has retaliated by passing this legalize-P2P bill, which still needs govt approval. The message appears to be: if you create this dumbass copyright law, we'll respond by legalizing P2P, so just back off, all right?
Reader comment: thibaut sailly says,
Did you know that the morning the debate started, the minister of Culture (author of the law) invited Virgin and Fnac to demo their online music stores to representatives >inside< the Assemblée Nationale ? Virgin even offered 10€ certificates to those who were going to vote the law. Nice aye ? Link to article (in french)
Update: Here's an opinion piece from Thomas Crampton, guestblogger at joi.ito.com and contributor to the International Herald Tribune.
