This DADVSI law is about legalizing the use of DRMs in France. Under the pressure of lobby of the music industry, the law plans to illegalize every cultural content exchange outside of the legal offer. The trick here is that "legal" should be understood as "commercial". The point of view is to say that all the available content on P2P plateforms is illegal content (stolen from the "artists" (Here, "artists" should be understood as the "music distribution system")). It completly denies the existence of content in the public domain, or content willingly given for free by the artists.
To control the flow of cultural content, this law legalizes the use of DRMs. Worse, those DRMs are given a legal protection. Working around a DRM becomes illegal and assimilated to counterfeit (max liability : 3 years in jail and a 300 000 bill). It means that if you have something like the sony rootkit on your computer, you don't have the right to disable it, even if it is a security breach for your system. In this system, it seems obvious that "legitimate" DRM system would include spyware-like function soon enough.
As sending every downloader in jail is cleary impossible in real life (about 10 000 000 downloaders in France), the law sets a progressive answer to illegal download. Most of the time, an Internet user would pay a 38 bill. Finding those downloaders means that you have to spy the traffic. I have not understood it all yet, but there would be something like a "private police" on the Internet who would be able to tell who is an illegal downloader. No judge involved here, just of bunch of people appointed by who knows who.
We don't have "fair use" in France, but something called "private copy". Basically, to compensate the lost sales from the private copy, each blank media (CDs, DVDs, HDs, MP3 players) is taxed. The money raised from this tax is given to a society in charge of redistributing it to the artists/producers.
The governement says that they will take care of protecting this private copy, and force interoperability. This is only talk as nothing constraining is set in the law.
Here is an exemple of how well they understand what they are talking about : on the website set by the governement to communicate with the people, they asked : "what do you expect from interoperability ?" This is a foolish question, as interoperability is a definition of a technical fact. What we expect from interoperability is to be !
the final joke is that legalizing DRM would probably have very little effect on music downloads. For it to work, you'd have to ensure that absolutly no unprotected copy of the content you want to protect exists... good luck:) Most probably, people would switch to anonymized and encrypted networks.
In such a context, i guess the music industry would surely decline. Outlawing the music downloads instead of taking it into account in the law means also that they won't be able to set a way for the Internet to finance the cultural industry (not counting the commercial online distribution).
While I'm at it, a little clarification. MPs did not adopted a global license. What they voted is a amendment saying that a download from the Internet falls under the definition of what "private copy" is. This was one of the needed steps to set a global license (a proposal of tax taken on the Internet subscriptions that would be redistributed as the "private copy" tax is. Many points of how such a license would work have not really been discussed as the music industry / pro-DRM people have always globally rejected it). The global license has never been actually voted (Misleading titles in the media, confusion volontarilly backed by some MPs for PR reasons).
PS: as english is not my mother tongue, i hope this comment is understandable PPS: what i wrote here is my interpretation of what's going on. Do not take it as a neutral description of the situation as it probably is not:)
might be redundant by now but try using google groups from google main page. The advanced search is now beta advanced search
Note the beta. You link to the old google group advanced search but i guess you got it from your bookmarks;)
I am french, and what you said about french criminal justice system surprised me.
I checked this, and for those who can read french :
"III. - Toute personne suspectée ou poursuivie est présumée innocente tant que sa culpabilité n'a pas été établie...." from http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/html/frame_codes1.ht m
I would translate that this way:
"every suspected person is assumed innocente as far as it's guiltness has not been proven"
well, maybe not very well translated, but i think
it 's enough to get the general meaning
sorry, i don't have much to say about yahoo's case
Slashdot Mirror
At least another counter-example is Le Mans (one hour from Paris by TGV too).
Actually, you could even commute from/to Brussels =)
This DADVSI law is about legalizing the use of DRMs in France.
... good luck :)
:)
Under the pressure of lobby of the music industry, the law plans to illegalize every cultural content exchange outside of the legal offer. The trick here is that "legal" should be understood as "commercial". The point of view is to say that all the available content on P2P plateforms is illegal content (stolen from the "artists" (Here, "artists" should be understood as the "music distribution system")). It completly denies the existence of content in the public domain, or content willingly given for free by the artists.
To control the flow of cultural content, this law legalizes the use of DRMs. Worse, those DRMs are given a legal protection. Working around a DRM becomes illegal and assimilated to counterfeit (max liability : 3 years in jail and a 300 000 bill). It means that if you have something like the sony rootkit on your computer, you don't have the right to disable it, even if it is a security breach for your system. In this system, it seems obvious that "legitimate" DRM system would include spyware-like function soon enough.
As sending every downloader in jail is cleary impossible in real life (about 10 000 000 downloaders in France), the law sets a progressive answer to illegal download. Most of the time, an Internet user would pay a 38 bill.
Finding those downloaders means that you have to spy the traffic. I have not understood it all yet, but there would be something like a "private police" on the Internet who would be able to tell who is an illegal downloader. No judge involved here, just of bunch of people appointed by who knows who.
We don't have "fair use" in France, but something called "private copy". Basically, to compensate the lost sales from the private copy, each blank media (CDs, DVDs, HDs, MP3 players) is taxed. The money raised from this tax is given to a society in charge of redistributing it to the artists/producers.
The governement says that they will take care of protecting this private copy, and force interoperability. This is only talk as nothing constraining is set in the law.
Here is an exemple of how well they understand what they are talking about : on the website set by the governement to communicate with the people, they asked : "what do you expect from interoperability ?" This is a foolish question, as interoperability is a definition of a technical fact. What we expect from interoperability is to be !
the final joke is that legalizing DRM would probably have very little effect on music downloads. For it to work, you'd have to ensure that absolutly no unprotected copy of the content you want to protect exists
Most probably, people would switch to anonymized and encrypted networks.
In such a context, i guess the music industry would surely decline. Outlawing the music downloads instead of taking it into account in the law means also that they won't be able to set a way for the Internet to finance the cultural industry (not counting the commercial online distribution).
While I'm at it, a little clarification. MPs did not adopted a global license. What they voted is a amendment saying that a download from the Internet falls under the definition of what "private copy" is. This was one of the needed steps to set a global license (a proposal of tax taken on the Internet subscriptions that would be redistributed as the "private copy" tax is. Many points of how such a license would work have not really been discussed as the music industry / pro-DRM people have always globally rejected it). The global license has never been actually voted (Misleading titles in the media, confusion volontarilly backed by some MPs for PR reasons).
PS: as english is not my mother tongue, i hope this comment is understandable
PPS: what i wrote here is my interpretation of what's going on. Do not take it as a neutral description of the situation as it probably is not
might be redundant by now but try using google groups from google main page. ;)
The advanced search is now beta advanced search Note the beta. You link to the old google group advanced search but i guess you got it from your bookmarks
Obviously, you're not (Reading /. ? ;)
Well, i guess i'll have to consider buying a stronger purse to store all thoses coins i'll need to buy my new video card ...
I checked this, and for those who can read french : ..."t m
"III. - Toute personne suspectée ou poursuivie est présumée innocente tant que sa culpabilité n'a pas été établie.
from http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/html/frame_codes1.h
I would translate that this way:
"every suspected person is assumed innocente as far as it's guiltness has not been proven"
well, maybe not very well translated, but i think it 's enough to get the general meaning sorry, i don't have much to say about yahoo's case