French Parliament Votes to Allow File Sharing

[NJCher]

Dec. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The French Parliament voted last night to allow free sharing of music and movies on the Internet, setting up a conflict with both the French government and with media companies.

If the amendment survives, France would be the first country to legalize so called peer-to-peer downloading, said Jean-Baptiste Soufron, legal counsel to the Association of Audionautes, a French group that defends people accused of improperly sharing music files.

The law would be a blow to media companies that increasingly use the courts worldwide to sue people for downloading or sharing music and movie files. Entertainment companies such as Walt Disney Co., Viacom Inc. and News Corp.'s Fox say free downloading of unauthorized copies of TV shows and movies before they are released on DVD will cost them $5 billion in revenue this year.

``The deputies used this vote to show their independence from the government, but they don't know what they are doing,'' Nicolas Seydoux, chief executive of French cinema company Gaumont SA, said in an interview on France Inter radio. ``We are not trying to ban anything, just to make sure the work of others isn't stolen.''

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000085&sid=avOoTq8aXkU8




Cher

p.s. To fans of Gerd Leonhard and Kusek, it appears their vision may come true.

[ShrewdLiberal]

1. I download music off a pay website, and have burned about...

100 CDs the past 5 months or so--mostly European power-metal bands. Most of the CDs I've burned are limited edition Asian and European imports that cost like $30 - $50 bucks a CD. The website I joined is a European one--I don't wish the mention for the obvious reasons--and has everything imaginable (songs, lyrics, movies, commercials, pictures, etc.).

I will never again pay media companies for anything. The fact that CDs and DVDs are still $15 - $20 bucks a piece is nefarious. I've seen DVDs players for $20 after a mail-in-rebate. That's cheaper than some of the actual DVDs the damn things play! Rediculous!

Anyway, perhaps it's wrong to do what I'm doing. But if you buy 100 CD-Rs on eBay for $20 bucks like I do, then burn the 100 CDs, you'll save about $1500 - $1700 on rare imports. If CD-Rs can be had for 100 at $20 bucks on eBay, then surely the mega-media companies are paying less than that to dublicate bands CDs and do the inserts and jewel cases. Maybe a buck a piece to mass produce. I'm not an expert mathematician, but that is obviously a ripoff. Screw Sony, Atlantic, Elektra, Mercury, and all the other organized criminal orginizations ripping off Americans and the rest of the world.

[NJCher]

2. I don't think it's wrong

The fact of the matter is, technology has changed. A tangible product (the CD) has now become an intangible (a computer file). The recording industry has never paid artists any respectable portion of the sale of the CD. If they had, I might feel differently about this. The fact is, though, throughout the long history of the recording companies, they have always cheated the artist. The artist gets about 8 per cent of the price of the CD, according to Gerd Leonhard and John Kusek, two writers who have studied this situation.

I think most of us want to support our artists. If the money for a recording went directly to an artist, the situation would be much different.

Unfortunately for the recording industry, due to their policies they trained the artists well: to make money from appearances, merchandise, etc. Now the artists have a model to make money without the recording industry.

Here we have a situation where hustlers (the recording industry) who profited handsomely from other technological change now find themselves out in the cold. With little good will built up, they deserve to fall by the wayside.




Cher

[Occulus]

3. Very well stated.

I haven't purchased a single CD in about ten years, and only buy DVDs rarely. I saw what was starting to happen after the creative heyday of the eighties. Sure, some of those bands back then were outright bad, but it was balanced by the sheer volume of creative and unique music being produced.

Once the nineties hit, the recording industry found a "formula" that would "sell"- boy bands and Brittney. Ick. Gak. Hurl. And that was all they put out for a long long time. Then they starter their .mp3 war, and as far as I was concerned, that was that. I saw the writing on the wall, and mostly refuse to even waste my ears on radio at this point.

The recording industry would have us believe that even remixes found online are somehow tainted and violations of copyright. I have another, very good reason for refusing to accept this, though: the recording compaines are corporations, and as such, I don't feel they have a right to copyright in the first place, or indeed any other "right", because as corporations, they are not persons, but that is a whole different issue.

I wholeheartedly support downloading and downloaders. P2P networks and filesharing are very simply the best thing to happen to the music industry and the films industry in decades, and I really don't have a whole lot of time for their whining about "lost" profits (is it really lost if the profits would never have been made in the first place? I stopped buying their tripe before filesharing was an issue- they would never have had my cash to begin with).

At any rate, good for the French to tell those industries to go pound sand. It won't happen here- not for a long time, if ever- but it will contribute to the downfall of the bloated monster that is the recording and film industries, and I see that as a Very Good Thing. Once one nation legalizes filesharing, even incrementally, other countries (thanks to the very nature of the internet) have a much harder time enforcing their draconian copyright laws.

Nothing but a good thing as far as I can see. I've never much cared for our system of copyright, and I do think it's high time people everywhere started trying to undermine it in every possible way. Were it up to me, I'd give artists seven to ten years, after which the work cannot be copyrighted again- ever. That is, in our society, more than enough time to make your fortune if the work is truly good, and if it's not, well... you don't deserve the fortune for it.

Simple.