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French law has the same definition of private as you, for that matter.

Contrary to what the article says, the judgement ( http://www.juriscom.net/jpt/visu.php?ID=785 ) does not mention private copying. The judges just stated that the accused could legitimately claim he didn't know he was sharing copyrighted materials.

the judgment ( http://www.juriscom.net/jpt/visu.php?ID=785 ) does not authorize uploading nor does it say that uploading is considered private copying.

The judges took the decision to acquit him because :

- The guy could legitimately claim he didn't know he was sharing copyrighted stuff (he could have shared a whole folder and then incidentally placed copyrighted files in it).

- He had no means to formally tell that one file or another was under copyright (in fact only 1212 of the 1875 tunes he shared were).

- As has already been said, there's a tax on blank media that was precisely designed to compensate for such damage.

The judge only decided that download can be seen as private copy. Several other decisions in France go in the same direction. According to the current law, private copy cannot be prohibited by the copyright holders as long as the copy is intended to be used by the guy making the copy. It means you can rip a CD, put the MP3s on a website with restriced access and send a link to this website to your friends, but not directly send the MP3s by mail (because in this cause, you would be the one who create the copy to be used by someone else). In France, there is a non-negligible tax on writable CDs, on Flash memory, on hard drives which goes directly to the music/movie industries, as a compensation for private copy. What is new in this decision is about upload. But this is not related to the private copy so-called exception. The arguments are: (1) the guy only put files in a shared directory, he had no control on whether the files would be downloaded or not; (2) actually, the software did not even allow the guy to distinguish between files protected by copyright and other materials; (3) one cannot assume by default that the guy wanted to cheat. For those who read french: http://www.juriscom.net/jpt/visu.php?ID=785

As the texts are in french, here are the interesting points about this story :

1. There are not one but MULTIPLE lawsuits on that matter in France. The lawsuit ruled this june was brought by the "Consommation Logement et Cadre de Vie" (CCLV) association against EMI. There are pending lawsuits against sony and BMG. Then there is another french consumers association ("UFC Que Choisir") who sued EMI France, Warner France, Universal Pictures Video, Fnac and Auchan (the two latter are distributors).

2. The court just tested CDs of ONE artist and constated they could not be READ by some devices although the system was stated to prevent COPY.

3. The ruling stated that EMI had one month to put a label on that CD stating : "Warning, this CD cannot be read on every reader or autoradio".

4. EMI appealed.

5. the judgement is on this site.

6. Another article about the situation in Belgium where I read that an asshole from IFPI says "there is only 4 to 8 complains for 10 thousand CD" so it is not a problem. Lawsuit coming ...

Much is said on the Yahoo case that has created jurisprudence in France about some contents on Internet. That it is censorship, denying the freedom of expression and so on..

In fact, the judge decision (in emergency proceeding), that was later confirmed in appeal, is based on a law called Loi sur les propos incitant à la haine raciale i.e. "Law on utterances inciting to racial hatred" for the auction part.

Indeed, there are three part in this case: the auction, the hosting and the directory parts. For the hosting and directory parts, the judge has ruled against negationism that is a crime in France, a crime against the memories of all the victims of the Shoah.

An interesting quote in the subpoena (Assignation) says that a previous sentence about selling Nazi object (not on the WWW) rules that "Such activities trivialize dangerously horror and ensure mawkishly an obnoxious proselytism."

For those of you, who are interested with some details about the case, you can get there all the judicial file in French, and some translations in English on the links on this page.

Much is said on the Yahoo case that has created jurisprudence in France about some contents on Internet. That it is censorship, denying the freedom of expression and so on..

In fact, the judge decision (in emergency proceeding), that was later confirmed in appeal, is based on a law called Loi sur les propos incitant à la haine raciale i.e. "Law on utterances inciting to racial hatred" for the auction part.

Indeed, there are three part in this case: the auction, the hosting and the directory parts. For the hosting and directory parts, the judge has ruled against negationism that is a crime in France, a crime against the memories of all the victims of the Shoah.

An interesting quote in the subpoena (Assignation) says that a previous sentence about selling Nazi object (not on the WWW) rules that "Such activities trivialize dangerously horror and ensure mawkishly an obnoxious proselytism."

For those of you, who are interested with some details about the case, you can get there all the judicial file in French, and some translations in English on the links on this page.

Yahoo! said it was impossible to do. The court named experts to decide if it could be done or not. A few months later, the experts proposed techniques that permitted Yahoo! to block French citizens from accessing the Nazi stuff. The court ruled that Yahoo! then had to do it.

The report shown to the court was written only by the French expert, and neither of the other two agreed with it. The disagreement was more legal than technical - the French witness thought that a ruling ordering Yahoo! to do all it reasonably could would be enough to enforce the law, but the other two felt that it was pointless to require Yahoo! to spend such effort on measures which can be bypassed in a few seconds (say, through www.safeweb.com).

Having read the optimistic report from the dissenting expert, Judge Gomez decided to repeat his original ruling. This required Yahoo! to block any Nazi memorabilia advertisments from absolutely everyone in France, and all French citzens overseas. Not to take the measures the report proposed, but to set up the magic filter which everyone agreed was impossible.

The second judgement of 20th November 2000 is translated at the Center For Democracy & Technology. It orders Yahoo! to comply with the original order (p20):

We reject the plea of incompetence reiterated by YAHOO Inc.;
We order YAHOO Inc. to comply within 3 months ... with the injunctions contained in our order of 22nd May 2000...

Orders the pursuit of this proceeding at the hearing of Monday July 24, 200 at 14:00 (Chambers of Deputy Chief Justice Gomez), during to which Yahoo! Inc. shall submit to the measures that they shall take to put an end to the damage and the nuisance suffered by the plaintiffs and to prevent any new incidences of nuisance.

Let me sum up the case, I don't think you've read correct material about it.

Three French anti-racist associations sued Yahoo! Inc. (not Yahoo! France): they wanted Yahoo! to stop displaying Nazi-related objects on their website yahoo.com (again, not yahoo.fr) and on their affiliate site geocities.com

The court ruled that Yahoo! Inc. had to block French citizens from accessing pages containing this stuff, based on French law saying that you can't display Nazi-related objects in France (and though the server is in the US, pages can be displayed in France, that's what the court said)

Yahoo! said it was impossible to do. The court named experts to decide if it could be done or not. A few months later, the experts proposed techniques that permitted Yahoo! to block French citizens from accessing the Nazi stuff. The court ruled that Yahoo! then had to do it.

Now Yahoo! refused to do it (though it decided to remove Nazi stuff from Auctions, and some other stuff too) and an US court has to decide if the French court ruling can be applied in the US.

A summary of the case (in French [sorry I didn't find anything in English], made by a lawyer) is available online here.

Yahoo! was never ordered to cease commercial activity in France, and it is still operating over here (see yahoo.fr).

Everything you're saying about Yahoo! being a French business appealing to an US court is also wrong. This is US based Yahoo! Inc. that was sued in France.

If the French government thought this one through, they could earn a tremendous amount from the "taxation" of speech on the Internet. Their fines aren't nearly high enough to dissuade global media companies from doing whatever they want.

Witness the actual fines levied against Yahoo! (From Juriscom.net):

Condemns Yahoo! Inc. to pay to LICRA the amount of 10,000 Francs on the basis of article 700 of the New \code of Civil Procedure;

Condemns Yahoo! Inc. and Yahoo France to pay to UEJF an amount of 10,000 Francs on the basis of article 700 of the New Code of Civil Procedure;

Declares that no further measures are appropriate at this juncture;

Awards the costs of LICRA's action to be borne by Yahoo! Inc. and those of the UEJF by Yahoo! Inc. and Yahoo France.

Yahoo! should chalk this up as a "cost of doing business" and keep doing whatever it is they've been doing.