Slashdot Mirror
French President Busted For Copyright Violation
An anonymous reader writes "ZeroPaid has an interesting take on the story of Nicolas Sarkozy being accused of copyright infringement. The irony, of course, is Sarkozy's pushing of a 3-strikes law — disconnecting from the Internet those accused of file sharing — in France and across the EU. The French president had apparently offered to settle the copyright infringement accusation for one Euro, but the band rejected the offer, calling it an insult. The article notes that each year since 2006, a high-profile anti-piracy entity has been on the wrong end of a copyright infringement notice. In 2008, Sony BMG was sued for software piracy. In 2007, anti-piracy outfit BASCAP received a cease and desist order related to pirated software. And in 2006, the MPAA was accused of pirating 'This Film is Not Yet Rated'."
Also, for information, the 3-strikes law will be discussed next week, and implies juicy stuff like "guilty until proven innocent" and "you can only prove innocent if you have installed official government trojan horses on your computer" and "these malware have no requirement of interoperability, which hurts the choice of costumers (!)". Citizens and bloggers (such as myself) following the Quadrature du Net association are calling for a "blackout" (link in French, sorry) of the French side of the internet in protest.
~~~ Paf. Le chien.
The french president Nicolas Sarkozy is not directly sued for this copyright infringement. His own party (UMP) used the song during a meeting, and didn't reported it to the french RIAA (SACEM) for artist compensation, wich generally is pretty low.
The UMP party is sued for this, but not the french president, who was not in charge for the organization of this meeting, and has presidential immunity.
But's that's pretty funny anyway.
New Zealand, the government has put the law on hold pending agreement between rights holders groups and internet groups on the law's implementation. If no agreement the law will be suspended (whatever that means). NZ Herald news link
The song was used multiple times for his party's political campaign when the license purchased didn't allow that. From the much more informative article linked in the article, it sounds like they were permitted to use it once but then went on to use it multiple times and, additionally, put it on the internet. Then, rather than paying the difference for such use, the party offered €1. I can't imagine why the band wasn't amused...
In short, this wasn't a case of Joe User downloading a song; it was unauthorized commercial use.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
I know Nicolas Sarkozy being an omnipresent president and all, but it's not like he personally chose the song, right? It's actually some people among his political party (the UMP) that decided to play the song in two meetings.
Otherwise, the result is the same: the political party from which Nicolas Sarkozy is has been busted for copyright infringement. It's a further proof that copyright laws are being way too tentacular. Can't they just see it?
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security. --Ben Franklin
Well, you got that wrong then. It were the French that introduced the concept of presumption of innocence in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and later structured the way laws are written down in the Napoleonic Code
Of course, The Enlightenment was the source for these ideals as well as the inspiration for the the US Declaration of Independence and the constitution...
This had a major influence on European law making since Napoleon occupied most of it...
Okay, before my hearing got out of control, I was a musician: here's a big secret, the model that you're defending is one wher 1% of musicians are doing 99% of the music, and 1% of that 1% is a bunch of overpaid pretty faces overlording over underpaid musicians. The recording industry as it works now is the worst enemy of the artists, so fuck you. The real income for music is, AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN, live performance. If the corps had their way, half the music in the world wouldn't exist today because it's derivative work (hell, italian composers ripped off heartily from each other) or because there's blatant tributes.