I’m sure the French have a mot juste for this, but, with my French minor failing me for the umpteen
millionth time since college, I’ll chalk this up as one more bit of Gallic perversity that I find inexplicable,
or, as the French say, inexplicable.
Anyway, let’s time-travel way back before the Ages
of Enlightenment, Reason, or … La Renaissance. It was a dark and mean time, when getting access to music was
zealously guarded and those who sought access without paying through the nose were threatened with jail time. It was a
time we called Wednesday.
Calling for three-year jail sentences and fines of 300,000 euros for
illegally copying music, video or any other copyright-protected files, French legislators drafted “emergency legislation” that would
require software makers to include digital-rights management software in their products.
Over time, attitudes
changed and enlightenment spread across France’s bucolic landscape. Many moons passed. Well, really, barely one
moon.
It was a time known as Thursday. France, having bathed itself in the reasoning of Voltaire and
others, proclaimed itself
the first country in the world to propose the legalization of P2P downloading even though Spain had done it a year
earlier.
In reality, what appears to have happened is that, on a bill that would severely criminalize file sharing, opponents have tacked on an amendment that would legalize the practice and gotten that amendment approved 30 votes to 28.
Of note was the following passage:
”Authors cannot forbid the reproductions of works that are made on any format from an online communication service when they are intended to be used privately and when they do not imply commercial means directly or indirectly.”
The Association of Audionauts supports pairing the amendment’s text with a royalty tax collected from Internet service providers. Those companies would likely raise the money by levying a monthly fee—say, 2 to 5 euros—on customers who engage in a certain amount of downloading and uploading.
1. As far as I am concerned this is the way to do it. Who benefits the most from P2P? Why the ISP's of course. I can't walk ten feet without seeing an ad for DSL or Cable broadband talking about how great it is to download "Layla" or what have you.
If the labels and everybody else were smart, they would lobby for a federal law that provided for a monthly "downloading" fee and finally make money off of all these P2P's. Legalize it!
Of course the digital music providers would shit bricks and line up every last dime of their VC money to fight this tooth and nail... And the artists would probably get screwed, but that wouldn't be much of a change for them anyways.
Posted at 1:02AM on Dec 24th 2005 by sharky