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French MPs Consider P2P Downloads Again
gregbains writes "French MPs are preparing to vote again on a proposal that would allow users to download music and movies in exchange for a flat fee per month. This announcement caused outrage from the music and movie groups, but excitement from the vast majority of civilians." From the BBC article: "A report by the Economic and Social Council which advises parliament on new laws argued that P2P exchanges should be made legal. Meanwhile France's highest court, the Cour de Cassation, ruled there was no automatic right for consumers to make private copies of their own DVDs. As MPs prepare to vote again, backing for the global licence remains strong despite the government's opposition."
You're joke is in bad taste. Many people in the French resistance died fighting for freedom, despite the popular notion that the resistance didn't do much. Read the wiki entry.
but i'm le tired
well have a nap, THEN FIRE THE MISSILES
If you believe they have free speech, try distributing neo-nazi pamphlets in France. Free speech is, by definition, for everyone... except the French and similarly oppressed peoples.
Cour de cassation is like court of appeal. That's where you go when you want to appeal from a previous decision. I would not call it the highest court. There are several of them, in major cities. And the highest court, similar to the Supreme court, is the Conseil Constitutionnel, ie Constitutional council.
linky
You mean 20 euros.
Like parliament, or garage, or apartment, or restaurant, or ...
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
There is always the very real danger that a bunch of lawmakers who know no better will pass malformed laws with unforseen consequences. Spreaqding the word about the germination of a potential stupid law in its early phases and causing an uproar among the subset of the population equipped with brains are ocasionally the only things that stand in the way of it being passed.
In legal matters, there is never any such thing as too much information, only too litte.
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I'm afraid this person who I assume is a fellow French national, is a little bit misinformed himself about the workings of his own country : the Cour de Cassation IS the highest court for civil law. There are three institutions that cover what the Supreme Court does in the US : The Cour de Cassation and the Council of State are the highest appeals for respectively civil law and administrative law. The former rules whether justice was administered properly in cases involving crimes and felonies of people or businesses. The later judges whether the State and the local governments act within their legit powers and is the highest appeal for people who, to put in in American terms, "sue the government". And finally the Constitutionnal Council censors bills when they are incompatible with the constitution or international law, _before thay are made into law_. It is not possible to appeal to it once the law is signed, unlike with the Supreme Court.
Sign the petition for a global licence by L'Alliance Public-Artists (public and artists for a legal solution for exchanges on the Internet). The organization mentioned in the BBC story is L'Association Des Audionautes. All pages are in French. Use Google Language Tools if you need a translation.
I think your comment about the Eastern Front neglects to really appreciate how close the Russians were, at several points, to losing that portion of the war. It's quite believable that if the Germans hadn't had to fight a war on two fronts simultaneously, they would have overcome the Russian resistance.
... fuck you, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys." I believe it's also the same motivation that drives a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment; with the exception of a few outright racists, I don't think your average middle-class white guy really thinks one thing or the other about Muslim people, but on hearing that they 'all hate America,' and by extension him, they become "dirty shit-colored sand-niggers." And once that decision to dislike is made, it's very hard to reverse.
It's a moot point, obviously, and since it didn't happen we can go back and forth on it all day.... frankly if you want to come up with a trite conclusion as to why we're not all speaking German right now, I think it's really Hitler that should get the credit, for such severe lack of foresight that they invaded Russia at all.
But getting back to your original point, I really don't think that most Americans hate or even really and truly dislike the French -- I think the "anti-French" sentiment is more of a defensive reaction to perceived anti-American sentiment. It boils down to this: "So you don't like us? Well
In general, if you wanted to pick some personality traits for the American body politic, you'd probably want to start off the list with "defensive." I think this is not well appreciated by many foreign people -- the assume that the public opinion of America would not be affected by what other people think of it, but this is patently not the case. In general, it seems as though the widely-accepted reaction, on learning that people in a foreign country generally dislike America, is to 'hate them back' with equal venom. Obviously, I think this just leads into the sort of degenerate spiral you see today, between the US and a whole lot of places.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I think the biggest problem in the past 10 years with entertainment companies AND consumers is that each side forgets it needs the other.
Wrong.
Check out how $16-1c paid for a single record gets split (source:
$0.17 Musicians' unions
$0.80 Packaging/manufacturing
$0.82 Publishing royalties
$0.80 Retail profit
$0.90 Distribution
$1.60 Artists' royalties
$1.70 Label profit
$2.40 Marketing/promotion
$2.91 Label overhead
$3.89 Retail overhead
The only part that is not complete waste is $1.60 that goes for artists' royalties. This includes recouping all of their costs, taxes, profits, etc. Everything else is just overhead.
Pressing CDs is a matter of a few cents, boxes and covers are a bit more expensive. Distribution of CDs can be way cheaper than it is the case for daily newspapers -- a CD is a bit smaller, and no one will notice if it takes weeks instead of hours to get to its destination. You can add marketing costs if you don't believe in alternate means of promotion -- just to count all the costs in the classic way.
Every penny extra goes to anti-customer anti-artist parasites, the worst possible type of middle-men.
Now, the analysis above applies only if you use the old way -- CDs in plastic boxes. In comparison, using the Net reduces the distribution costs to fractions of cents per record -- and it can do all marketing for you as well.
So, why exactly do we need RIAA and MPAA again?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.