p2pnet.net News Feature:- On July 28, prominent French ISPs and copyright owners signed a deal to fight against piracy and promote legal platforms.

Interestingly, the “Charter of engagements for the deployment of the legal online music offer, the respect of intellectual property rights and the fight against digital piracy” has also been signed by three members of the government – the minister of economics, the minister of industry, and the minister of culture.

The most quoted clause was to the effect that French Internet users will have their connections cut off if they’re convicted of piracy by a tribunal.

Although this isn’t accurate, the Charter does hold dark perspectives for the future of p2p.

When reading the document, the ISPs strategy becomes clear. Service providers yearn to become the leaders in the distribution of (payable) digital content, and Big “Four-and-a-half” thus becomes their best ally.

By signing the Charter, the ISPs agreed not to promote the distribution of music which isn’t clearly ‘legal’. They’ll notify their ‘pirate’ suscribers as soon as they get a complaint from a copyright holder, and they’ll also clear their portal from any link leading to illegal music distribution services.

Will Kazaa or eDonkey be considered illegal by the ISPs? No one knows. If so, our ISPs portal websites will totally ignore p2p services. Even Ratiatum.com, a 100% legal website, could be outlawed, just because we promote p2p networks.

Why did ISPs sign such a Charter?

One could guess they simply want to escape liability in case of a lawsuit for contributory copyright infringement.

Well, that’s true, but that’s not all. The document says the copyright owners shall keep their works available to the legal platforms, including “the ones that would be created by the Internet service providers”.

So there we go. French ISPs will soon be competing with iTunes, Napster, Sony, OD2 and others by creating their own legal services. In the meanwhile, ISPs should even serve as a billing intermediary – you download on iTunes, you pay Wanadoo (the major French ISP).

So p2p users become a common ennemy.

But the main point with that Charter is: it creates a governmentally organized lobbying union.

In fact, at the end of the document (signed by 3 ministers, remember?), the parties say that they’ll meet every two months to study “any legislative or regulation measure” they should take.

Isn’t that beautiful?

French speaking readers can read a whole analysis of the Charter on Ratiatum.com here.

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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 Emails from France: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six.

A new Ratiatum and p2pnet collaboration will be announced when p2pnet changes its look in the very near future.

Stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2004 at 8:50 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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