French movie ‘pirate’ acquitted
p2pnet.net News :- In yet another bitter defeat for the Big Seven movie studio cartel, two French courts have confirmed that downloading a movie file for personal use is acceptable.
A man accused of downloading 500 film and music files has been acquitted by the Montpellier Court of Appeals in the south of France, confirming an earlier ruling by a bankruptcy court in Rodez in October last year, says Belgium’s Le Vie du Net.
The court said once a work has been made public, it can be copied for personal use.
The plaintiff admitted lending CDs made from his copies to friends. But this still fell within the concept of ‘personal use,’ the court ruled.
The man’s lawyers argued the CDs had already been bought and paid for before they appeared online.
Unhappy with the bankruptcy court’s decision and siding with the entertainment industry, the French government, , had demanded that the man be fined e5.000, more than $6,730.
The studios’ MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is currently trying to stop movies from appearing online by shutting down BitTorrent sites.
(Thanks, Estelle – and thanks Liz ; )
UPDATE: 9:22 AM Pacific – "This does not mean that the Court has judged that movie downloading is now legal in France on a general basis." says a post on Corante, going on:
"Though I have not (yet) seen the judgment, it (probably) gives the indication that private use may be a defense against a claim of copyright infringement for downloading. While this might be called a recognition of the private copying clause in the digital environment, it is not clear if this will hold up.
"There are currently about 50 comparable criminal cases pending, and in the past users have been sentenced for these acts."
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See:-
Le Vie du Net – Le pirate français relaxé, March 11, 2005
Corante – French Court Says Downloading for Private Use May Be Defensible, March 11, 2005
March 11th, 2005 at 7:19 pm
With BT, you’re uploading as well as downloading. And from the description of the case it seems likely that uploading to strangers would not be excused as personal use.
Actually it doesn’t say what service or form of filesharing he was using. So I would conclude, even if this ruling is applied widely it won’t protect BT users who are sharing copyrighted materials without permission. But it is an encouraging sign of reasonable rules for the public as against the pigopolists’ copyright extremism.
March 23rd, 2005 at 9:47 pm
Notice that he has been acquitted in Montpellier, in the south of France, where people usually interpret the laws in a much less harsh way than they do in the north of the country…