p2pnet.net News:- They were promised for the beginning of July. But the music industry here was impatient.

The first John-Doe lawsuits were launched in France on Monday by the Civil Society of Phonographic Producers (SCPP) against 20 alleged copyright infringers.

SCPP had already said it was planning on suing a large number of users this summer, and even ISPs could be sued in September.

Pascal Negre, president of Universal Musical France and president of the SCPP, warned that “this summer, it would be better surfing on waves than on pirate sites.”

The SCPP, “hope that [these lawsuits] will result on deterrent general intestet penalties and on deterrent financial penalties. It’s the end of impunity”, said SCPP chairman Marc Guez.

These first 20 users were carefully selected.

All are heavy p2p file sharers, and all are apparently stupid.

The SCPP simply looked at their open shared folders and chose those with the most “interesting” content. Then they wrote down the relevant IP addresses and simply handed them over to the police.

We wonder, though, how the labels managed to collect these IP addresses without infringing our privacy law, which forbids such collection without the assent of the user.

In Canada, when Justice Finckenstein affirmed that P2P file sharing was legal, some law students in Ottawa found so many mistakes that they suspected CRIA wanted to lose the case to force the government to change the law in order to add new infringing behaviors (especially the fact to “make works available to the public”).

One could imagine the French RIAA wants the government to back up the upcoming bill that would enable them to freely collect IP addresses…

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Guillaume Champeau, who runs Ratiatum.com, p2pnet’s opposite number in France, and p2pnet editor Jon Newton, decided they owe it to their respective readers to trade items every now and then.

Champeau’s first Email from France is here, the second is here, the third is here, and the fourth is here.

A new Ratiatum and p2pnet collaboration will be announced when p2pnet changes its look next month.

Stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2004 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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