France joins anti-file sharing attack
p2pnet.net News:- It may be time to get out the mattresses. Big Music seems to be going to the wall on file sharing.
The US has been under siege for quite a while with some 1,600 people accused of ignoring copyrights, and Canadians are waiting to see if the CRIA will win a court order enabling it to theoretically force Canadian ISPs to reveal the names of some of the clients who are said to be sharing music online.
Now, “France is poised to join a cross-border legal battle against people who swap songs for free on the Internet,” says a Reuters story here.
“Whatever happens, lawsuits against Internet users are inevitable,” Herve Rony, head of SNEP (Syndicat National de l’Edition Phonographique), told Reuters in an interview.
Like other music industry enforcers such as the RIAA (Recording Industry Aasociation of America) the UK’s BPI ( British Phonograph Industry) and the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) SNEP is wholly owned by the Big Five record labels – Universal Music, Warner Music, EMI, Sony Music and Bertelsmann’s BMG.
Rony said that in France, the industry’s strategy would not only target individuals pirating music on the Internet, but would also focus on a new responsibility for Internet service providers to put in place filters that prevent music pirating, Reuters said.
This last is in probable reference to the fact RIAA boss Mitch Bainwol has been marketing RepliCheck ’song-recognition software,’ owned by a company in which the RIAA has a virtual commercial interest, as a product able to filter and/or block material from distribution on p2p networks.
However, Bainwol’s claims notwithstanding, so far all attempts by p2p companies to see if RepliCheck is effective have been ignored by the music industry, despite Bainwol’s statement that he’d be “delighted” for the p2p operators to test it.
Back in France, “We have a two lines of fire: taking action against individual Internet users does not imply we will not act against service providers to oblige them to filter,” Rony told Reuters, saying a law that “gives service providers responsibility in preventing music piracy by using filters to prevent downloading of files protected by copyright” is due to come into force soon.
Moreover, continues the report, “besides that change, French law does not offer the same levels of protection to copyright holders as British and American laws afford.
In the meanwhile,attempts to update from the IFPI and RIAA sites continue to fail since both web pages appear to be offline for unexplained reasons, as originally reported by p2pnet.
The BPI and SNEP sites are still functioning as normal, however.
