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Legal Victory for P2P in France
nietsch writes "The Register is reporting that a french Kazaa user that had been sued by the SCPP (the french equivalent of the RIAA) has been acquitted by the courts in his county. 'The Judges decided that these acts of downloading and uploading qualified as private copying' Ars Technica has more coverage on the subject, or you can read it in english from the organization that lead the defense."
Who knew france would be the country to stick up for digital copy rights?
The music industry is very used to getting their way. They have plenty of money to give to politicians when they aren't giving it to radio stations in illegal pay for play schemes. Give them a while and they will bribe the bad news away...
That's the most public form of the word "private" I've ever seen.
Somehow I doubt copying is truly "private" if it involves people you don't know, who could possibly number in the thousands or more...
I might agree that someone sending a copy to a friend could be considered "private copying" depending on your definition, but to put it on p2p where the whole world can download it seems much more public than private. The french court must have some very interesting definitions indeed.
Someone should have checked judges personal computers to understand merits of this verdict.
I'd like to see a clear definition of private copying.
At what point does retrieving a file from someone else's computer stop being private? I completely understand someone making copies of all kinds of things within their home. When someone I don't know is making copies of my files - this is when it seems to be anything but private. I'm not advocating a particular POV about copyrighted materials here... I'm thinking in terms of the moment that a file ceases to be "my" file and becomes "someone else's file."
A Passionate Independent Musician
SCPP:
Go and tell your master that we have been charged by God with a sacred quest. If he will give us money for the MP3s, he can join us in our quest for the Holy Racketeering Scheme.
FRENCH JUDGE:
Well, I'll ask him, but I don't think he'll be very keen. Uh, MP3s are free you see...
SCPP:
What?
RIAA:
He says MP3s are free!
SCPP:
Are you sure they're free?
FRENCH JUDGE:
Oh, yes. They're very nice-a. (I told him MP3s are free.)
POLICEMEN:
[chuckling]
SCPP:
Well, u-- um, can we come up and have a look at your MP3 collection?
FRENCH JUDGE:
Of course not! You are English types-a!
SCPP:
Well, what are you, then?
FRENCH JUDGE:
I'm French! Why do think I have this outrageous accent?!
RIAA:
What are you doing in England?
FRENCH JUDGE:
Mind your own business!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It's like placing a stack of burned DVDs on your windowsill, with a big sign saying "Meatloaf and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra", and everyone else on the street doing the same. Maybe somebody will wander past and take one of them. Maybe you'll wander past someone else's window and help yourself to some of their "Bon Jovi: Crush" CD-Rs. Sure, it's private copying, but it's pretty blatant what the intent is.
I can't help but wonder if that's just going to give legitimate fair-use copying a bad name.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
It means private as in non-commercial, not as in kept hidden from the rest of the world.
This is old news.
The act of downloading is considered fair game but the act of uploading without the correct licence is still illegal.
you also have to know that in France there is a "tax on the private copy". When you buy a blank CD or DVD, you pay a tax that goes directly in the SCPP's pocket. The judge recognized that by burning most of the downloaded stuff, this particular person was in fact paying for his stuff and denied his responsability.
BTW, isn't it a last year news ?
On a side note, French parliament is currently examining a law that would legalize a "P2P fee", legalizing 100% of P2P downloadable stuff. Its chances to pass are thin, but there is currently a heated debate (most politician think about the 2007 presidential elections)
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
What they seem to be looking at is accepting that people are going to use P2P networks anyway, and look at implementing some kind of revenue model to ensure that music publishers don't get so antsy in france that they sue dead people who have never used a computer.
"But," I hear you cry, "what's to stop me using Brand X esoteric open source P2P software?". Well, if you are using and not paying, you are now committing an offence against the state.
Which makes it a damn sight easier to get your arse put in prison.
Cunning.
-- "You never mentioned comets before, Mac. This opens up a whole new area of negotiation." - Gordon Urquart
The title is misleading. Maybe "Legal Victory for a P2P user in France" would be better.
France uses the "civil law" system (as opposed to the "common law" system used in the U.S., the U.K., and the Commonwealth, past and present). It's based on the Roman corpus iuris civilis, and it doesn't have any such thing as "precedent." Each and every case is decided purely on the facts of the case, the law as written, and the judge's... erm... well... judgment.
This doesn't mean P2P is legal in France. It means someone got away with it.
This made me thinking about joining a social network like Orkut with music sharing and share your music only with your friends and maybe friends of friends. That could get around some legal hurdles in more countries and while you don't get this way any music you want, you still get quite a lot new music and actually improve the relationships with your friends through listening to some of the same music as them.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I would have thought, in this specific occurrence, that it is the US who surrendered to big business.
But I'm just French. And not even Republican. What do I know about spinning news?
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
This latest verdict is probably in line with the current French legislation. But since France is a member of EU, they will eventually have to implement the EU Copyright Directive (EUCD). The French parlament are in fact discussing this, the proposed french law is called "Droit d'Auteur et aux Droits Voisins dans la Société de l'Information" (DADVSI), and though opposition is tough it will certainly come to life soon, as all EU directives must in all member states.
Then P2P networks and the use of them, even to share innocent files, will be illegal. This law will also affect Open Source software development, so it might matter more than you think.
You can help the French community by signing a petition here:
http://eucd.info/index.php?English-readers
... we can route all our P2P traffic via proxy/router thru France in order to be immune from prosecution/lawsuits? - sweet!
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
pwnez
I kind of agree, particularly when you consider the fact that a lot of these P2P companies are selling the software for profit, or selling ads in the software for profit.
Calling the current state of P2P apps "sharing" is still one of the most intelligence insulting stances I think a person could argue from. How is making an exact bit for bit copy of a song/program/whatever file on a strangers computer considered sharing. If I share an XBOX game with a friend, we either both sit down and play it together, or I physically give him the DVD therefore precluding me from using it at the same time. How would me burning the game to another disk, a disk from which he could make an exact bit for bit copy, and give to another friend, and so on and so on... be considered "sharing"? It's wrong, and the fact that so many people choose to defend P2P and burning bit-for-bit copies of CD's as sharing, is an insult to content distributors everywhere, from Adobe, to the RIAA, even Shareman Networks put a stop to DietKazza/KazzaLight.
Both sides are guilty of putting forward faulty logic in an effort win the argument. Both the RIAA, and the P2P community. I hate DRM just as much as the next guy, and I think it's something that shouldn't be necessary, but in this pro P2P era, where forgery is considered correct, and defensible by so many people. How could you blame content distributors for trying to protect their products. Do I feel that they're going about this the wrong way? Absolutely. However I can see why the P2P communities actions as a whole, encourages such drastic responses. The worst part is P2P's actions are giving them incentive, and desperately needed fodder to further advance the idea of DRM into the commercial, and legislative arena.
I think this decision is fair. You guys have to be aware that french people pay a special tax when they buy blank CDs. Where does it go? Into the SACEM's (~RIAA) pockets. So anyone buying CD-R/CD-RW is already paying for the right to make copies. And if you use the CD-R to make a backup of your documents (yes, I know, who does that?), you basically paid the tax for nothing. So let's download citoyens !
I think also the distinction between private and public is in the money. If you download for your personal use, and do not make money out of it, you're good. But if you burn the downloaded music and sell the CD, you're evil! Actually, making money and being evil are very strongly connected in France. Darn capitalists!
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
it only takes 1 step to start a thousand mile walk... is this the first step in stoping companies like this?
portfolio
It's interesting that France, home of almost-legal p2p for copyrighted files, is also the center of activity for Jamendo, which is one of the most interesting and innovative, non-controversial ways to use peer file sharing software. It's a music sharing website, but all artists release their music under Creative Commons licenses, and you can download albums on eMule or BitTorrent networks, which saves Jamendo on bandwidth.
I would have assumed that encouraging legal downloading of mainstream, copyrighted files would have discouraged the growth of shared, open alternatives. But the opposite seems to be true.
I personally love that concept. On the top of it, I would love to see a completely voluntary listening-reporting system in which the music that you listen to gets reported to a central server to determine how much a song is getting listened to (limited by user), and thus give the artists a logarithmicly-scaled share of the tax revenue (thus helping small artists).
It's time for Operation Crazy Plan.
And in the US we have the "DAT tax", which was extended to cover blank cassettes, Blank VHS tapes, and music (not data) CD-R. This is a royalty that goes to the labels, artists, producers, etc. regardless of what you record on the blank media, was lobbied for by the MPAA/RIAA, and is meant to ensure that IP owners get paid for at-home copying. So we're good to go, right?
"Hey, the third matrix movie would have been good except for the plot,story, and acting." --AC
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.
Asking a country to participate in war (that was started on false premises) because they can profit from it is one of the more disgusting things I have ever heard.
I would say that good relations with Iraq, not to mention not killing thousands of innocent people, is much more important than slaughtering people and destroying countries for money.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks