France as Big Music copyright cop
p2pnet news | Music:- Criminalising young music fans isn’t the way to handle music industry problems, professor Lawrence Lessig told attendees at the Midem conference in Cannes, France.
He’s quoted by the Financial Times in a story which says soon, French citizens will be spammed by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG spam. And the junk mail will be sent to them by the French government.
Jean Berbinau, general secretary of Armt, the regulatory authority for digital copyright, doesn’t agree with Lessig and incredibly, the Big 4 now have the French government poised to act as unofficial corporate copyright cop, funded by taxpayers.
“They [the spams] would be sent to each IP [internet protocol] address,” the story quotes Berbinau as stating
“It is not a huge technical challenge.”
Legislation, “allowing the French government to send email warnings to anyone downloading music tracks without paying for them should be passed by the summer, a senior official said on Sunday,” says the FT.
“We have to do something, but it is only transitional, only to give time to the industry to adapt and maybe to encourage a new business model,” it has Berbinau stating.
However, the story doesn’t explain why the French government should be harassing French music lovers while the members of the Big 4 organised music cartel belatedly try to figure out how to operate in the 21st digital century.
Berbinau is, “charged with implementing the measures announced last year by French president Nicolas Sarkozy,” says the story
The Big 4 spams, “would tell people they had been caught breaking copyright laws, would not only be sent to those involved in large-scale file-sharing, he said.
Also See:
Financial Times – French plan e-mail warnings for illegal downloads, January 27, 2008
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe
to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.phpNet access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details. Download here.
January 28th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
WTF! Come on France, get a life!
January 28th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
The pack of tap worm in chief is Vivendi Universal Boss Levy and the President Sarkozy is a neo-con just like George Bush but smaller shorter more stupid more depraved and more coward. With a name such as Sarkozy which by the way is not a French name, no wonder! A sarcome is a Cancerous tumor! They were plenty of wanrning for not voting for this dwarf “Encule”!
Yet in the US when we elected Bushy we did not know what a Neo-Con was but in France they don’t have this excuse.
Are the Frenchs Stupid?
This being said it will be easy to use “anomysing” tools such as TORR and block the spam comming from the French Governement. it will be another Sword strike in the water. Typically French!
January 28th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
What type of $h!t is this!!! freakin this is so a la 1984.
January 29th, 2008 at 4:17 am
Holy crap….remind me to take France off the list of countries I thought had their crap together and aren’t actively involved in raping their citizens on a daily basis.
February 14th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Traditional publishers have been very slow to adapt to new media, particularly the internet. Many musicians and music teachers do what they have always done — play and teach — and now they do it on the web. Copyright laws have not kept up with the rate of change in technology.
March 7th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
They are going to be making ISP responsible in UK for illegal movie and music downloads. What I wonder is how they will know if someone has paid for it or will they target downloads from sites like Rapidshare and filesharing software like limewire.
Of course people will just adapt, will they check every zip or rar file? I doubt it. The music industry needs to adapt to the internet instead of trying to fight against it.