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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.
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.
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!