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French Record Labels Go After Limewire, SourceForge
An anonymous reader notes that TorrentFreak is reporting: "French record labels have received the green light to sue four US-based companies that develop P2P applications, including the BitTorrent client Vuze, Limewire, and Morpheus. Shareaza is the fourth application, for which the labels are going after the open source development platform SourceForge. ... Putting aside the discussion on the responsibilities of application developers for their users activities, the decision to go after SourceForge for hosting a application that can potentially infringe, is stretching credibility beyond all bounds." SourceForge is Slashdot's corporate parent.
That would depend on France's conflict rules, which (unusually, if I remember correctly) are that the courts of France have jurisdiction over any matter harming a French national. You are broadly correct - in the USA or most other countries, the courts would likely NOT have jurisdiction over the case. But France is France. That doesn't mean that the defendant would be able to enforce the judgment though. A US court could examine the question of whether the French courts had jurisdiction over the matter before agreeing to enforce the judgment, and that probably wouldn't fly.
Humans did not evolve from monkeys. Humans and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor. We're their distant cousins, not their children.
Already done. In France there is a special tax on hard disks (and CD, DVD,..) to pay for private copies ! (Even if you don't use your hard disk for music...)
In France, using encryption has long been illegal. I believe even SSL connections weren't allowed until the law changed in 1999.
So I wouldn't call this "stretching credibility", it's just on par for the course in that country where the government clearly doesn't have a clue about IT.
Worse, they're learning about IT - from the media mafia. For example, a year ago there were voices calling out for a complete internet ban for whoever is caught sharing a file, enforcing ISP's to act as police, attorney, jury and judge. Who came up with that idea? The IFPI. Who fell for it? The government.
You really need to look past your ignorance. The DMCA was required by WIPO treaty and as an extension to part of the berne convention as changed to allow the US to ratify it (which BTW, caused the copyright extensions).
The US didn't create the DMCA out of nothing. It was literally response to a treaty that all of Europe and other countries signed on to before we made the DMCA. The DMCA goes beyond the treaty a little but the meat is the same as the treaty requirements. The other countries creating their own DMCA are doing it for the same reason's the US did and that is because of treaty obligations.
Now you can claim that RIAA influenced the treaty and so on, this might be true, The recording industry was responsable for implementations of other treaties which more or less made Phonographs, tapes and CDs compatible across country borders which I would think most people see as a good thing.
Something else about the WIPO treaties, there are portions of them that basically say if the law in one land doesn't address something in the treaty, then the law of the aggrieved land can prevail. This will give France's court Jurisdiction over an American country just like it gives the US courts jurisdiction (including extradition rights) over other countries when violations occur that aren't violations in the other land. If France can pin the Source Forge action to a treaty, a US court must honor it unless the Supreme court finds something unconstitutional in some way. I suggest you look into the treaties we are obligated to if you actually want to effect any meaningful changes instead of blaming the wrong people. You can charge windmills all you want and probably never see changes in what your railing about because you don't understand the concept behind it.
And while they're at it, sue Slashdot for talking about this.
/. is owned by SourceForge inc., so that's aready covered.
The US didn't create the DMCA out of nothing. It was literally response to a treaty that all of Europe and other countries signed on to before we made the DMCA.
LoL
Yes, the USA created the DMCA out of nothing.
Clinton formed a working group under a guy named Lehman,
BUT, there was resistance in the USA to the anti-circumvention recommendation.
In response, Lehman took a shortcut through WIPO and a bad international treaty obligation was born.
As a result, the USA had to harmonize* the law with their treaty obligation.
The real tragedy is that because the US didn't want to pass the law in the first place,
everyone has to modify their copyright law.
*sometimes this is good and sometimes this is bad. It is rarely good when it is used to shove an unpopular law through your country's backdoor.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The thing is the French political system is built only on ideas, not people (politicians). As such, there is right wing party, left wing party... but most of our politicians are professional bureaucrats (and the rest are professional politicians, often with a lawyer background). Very very few of our politicians have a clue on science (i mean physics, medicine, ...) in general, let alone IT.
All this gives a pretty one-sided view on a lot of problems, "culture"-related issues being one of them.
About these stupid laws TFA is referring to, the worst is yet to come: a new big law (nicknamed Hadopi) is about to pass, as well as new ISP rules (they want ISPs to filter everything, using such wonderful technologies as DNS blacklisting). And you know what, most of these topics are handled by our culture minister, which, as a job reference, is the former director of the Versailles Palace museum.
But the worst part is that they will sell the ideals of the French Revolution to pure incompetence, helped by our undemocratic mass media system.
Well, thanks god, everybody in France know that freedom and human rights problems are only in Iran, China, Russia and Guantanamo...
Speaking of Berne, let's not forget that the French were the ones who pushed hardest for that treaty in the first place. So thanks a whole lot for the shitty version of copyright.
Bruce Lehman was the Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks under Bill Clinton. Clinton did form a working group but it didn't submit any laws until after WIPO. And yes, because of his positions in the Clinton administration, Lehman would have have direct input in the WIPO treaties, he did serve as the chair of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights, and so on. The WGIPR did nothing but submit reports for revew within the group's parent structure.
Then in 96, the WIPO organization met and came away with two treaties requiring the DMCA to be corrected. These treaties were the "WIPO Copyright Treaty" and the "WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty," which were adopted by consensus by over 150 countries. A goof portion of the DMCA, especially title one and two, comes directly out of the WIPO treaties and over 150 countries are required to make the same laws.
You should look at the report they put forward. (PDF warning) In which they recomend a general structure and highlight points that should change. If you look at the recommendations portion, you will see that the terms of the WIPO as well as the DMCA are only similar in spirit but the real meaty portions of the DMCA aren't really there. By Meat, I mean the stiff penalties and so on.
The French Senate has already passed the law banning people from the Internet if they are caught sharing files with each other. It now just one final vote in the National Assembly before it becomes law.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
two WIPO treaties that 150 of countries signed on to.
Which treaties are you talking about? The relevant one is the Copyright Treaty, and only 68 countries have ratified it. Another 26 or so have signed it but not ratified it, which means it's not in force in those countries. (Of the G8, only the US and Japan are among the ratifiers.)
The signature on the treaty is used as an excuse by the proponents of it to say that countries have international obligations to put a DMCA-like law in place, but it doesn't mean that at all. The signature is a general sign of support for it, but it implies no legal obligations.
Like Vivendi, which own,
Island Def Jam Records
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
1. Less than 100 countries signed onto either of those treaties. The page you refer to says they were adopted "by consensus", but that doesn't imply any countries signed onto them. It just says that at some WIPO meeting they were adopted by consensus.
2. The page you referred to says:
Both Congress and the Clinton Administration used these international treaties as an excuse for passing a broad, sweeping changes to U.S. copyright laws that were urged by the entertainment industry , despite the fact that such changes to U.S. copyright law were not required by the treaties themselves.
This contradicts your main point, which was that the WCT and WPPT obligated the US to pass the DMCA. No, the DMCA was passed because lobbyists convinced your government to pass it. It's a US invention.
Thanks for fixing the typo.
I'm Canadian. We have more or less the same movies and music available as in the USA, and no DMCA, though there have been a couple of attempts to pass one. (Canada signed the WCT, but has not ratified it). The Canada-US trading relationship is still the largest bilateral trading relationship in the world.
So the repercussions of not having a DMCA are at least not immediate.
Duncan
As a (former) developer, let me be the first to say:
Yes. There are French people who have contributed. France is the third most common country that Shareaza is used in, too.
This is after they already put legal pressure on the man who owned our domain name, used it to set up what is basically a scam site, and has even filed for a trademark of "Shareaza", filing under oath that it had never been used before they got their grubby little mitts on it.
just look at all the $country's Got Talent spin-offs that were launched after the success of American Idol.
Ah yes, American Idol, 2002, spin-off of the popular British series, Pop Idol, 2001.
If America's biggest export is culture, then its biggest import is credit for other people's ideas.