PHOTOGABBLE // BLOG POST

P2P File Sharing legal in French Law

February 9th, 2006

Finally a government has shown it can protect its citizen?s rights instead of reinventing the legal system in the favour of the corporations whom are intent on abusing it.

Copyright laws in recent years have become grotesquely deformed into a system by which you can't even legally backup your media files in some countries. The music and film industry are almost entirely to blame for this, especially in countries such as America and England where government have been lobbied by aforementioned media producers for changes in the law to restrict your right to copy music for personal use. Also in recent years these changes in law, have allowed the general public (you and me) to be criminalised by producers such stories as those where parents are forced to pay thousands of dollars in ?compensation? to record labels because unbeknown to them their children had been downloading and sharing music amongst their friends ? they are children for Christ sake, you think this is not going to screw them up?

The world saw some light amongst all the darkness when a federal judge in Canada ruled in 2004 that file sharing via p2p networks is legal, and now in 2006 that light has increased in intensity now that French law has been amended to legalise file sharing as long as your not making any financial profit from it ? this is the way that copyright laws should be.

Anthony G was taken to court by lobby group Soci?t? Civile des Producteurs Phonographiques who accused him of having 1,875 files containing copyright material. Anthony was a keen Kazaa user during 2004.
Lobby group L'Association des Audionautes, which defended Anthony, said: "On September 21, 2004, the prosecutor's office found 1,875 MP3 and DIVX files on the defendant's hard drive. Based on this discovery, a French record producer association known as the SCPP (Soci?t? Civile des Producteurs Phonographiques) sued him for downloading and uploading 1,212 music tracks.
The District Court of Paris, however, refused to agree with the SCPP's argument. Following the line of reasoning utilised by the ADA for nearly two years, the Judges decided that these acts of downloading and uploading qualified as "private copying".
The association said although the verdict was being appealed it was confident the higher court would uphold the decision.

I am a firm believer that if you like a band then you should buy their music, but I also believe that if your downloading music via p2p and not making any financial profit from it then you should not be victimised and forced to pay a multi billion dollar industry money that it doesn?t really need. Also it must definitely be made legal to share music you like with friends over applications such as msn (which currently it isn?t), and mp3?s you pay to download should never be restricted, its fair use to be able to copy it to any mp3 player and burn to cd the music that you purchased.
I understand that copyright is there to protect rights of the author but never at the disregard of consumers? rights.

Sources': Cnet News | Reg Hardware | Telegraph News

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Tags: Download, File Sharing, france, french law, Legal, p2p