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French Fire Guns In File Sharing War
John Stith
Staff Writer
2005-12-22
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
One must occasionally love the French. File sharing has become a serious pain in the arse for many a company producing music, movies or software. France however likes to make the pain really burn and they did. The French Parliament passed a law late last night, legalizing free file sharing of music and movies on the Internet. This is going to create a problem for media companies and the government itself.
If the law survives constitutional scrutiny, it'll make France the first nation to legalize peer-to-peer downloading of apparently anything. If the law holds up, it'll also become a nightmare for media companies. They spend a lot of time in court trying to quash these "pirates" of their material. If they can't stop this, downloads in France will be even more of a free-for-all than it already is.
The amendment is part of a bigger bill on intellectual property rights, "authors cannot forbid the reproduction of works that are made on any format from an online communications service when they are intended to be used privately."
This isn't done either though. The law still has to past muster through France's senate. They have the option to vote it down or re-open the debate. Also, French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres requested debate be reopened. It also seems the full parliament was in attendance during the vote so that may change the dynamic as well.
Regardless of the outcome, this law certainly adds some more character to this ongoing fight over copyright infringement. The current rules from the European Union are harsh on filesharing and extract harsh penalties including jail time. This amendment changes some of the tougher parts of the law. Now everyone waits and sees whether all this will hold up.
About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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