Will France legalize file sharing?
p2p news view / p2pnet: France will probably not legalize file sharing.
Sorry, but that’s the way it is. The headlines screaming about France giving the green light to file sharers have been quite misleading, but at there’s still some hope to be found.
For those unfamiliar with the French government, there’s a lower house called the National Assembly, just like the US Congress, the Australian House of Representatives or the British House of Commons. There’s also an upper house called the Senate, just like the US Senate, the Australian Senate or the British House of Lords.
Now, in France (just like everywhere else really), if you’re a member of the lower house and don’t turn up for work, they just carry on without you. That’s what happened in this case: everyone was away for Christmas and a handful of renegades who stayed behind jammed a "pro-p2p" amendment into a bill about intellectual property rights.
The French Culture Minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres has already asked that the debate be re-opened, so the pro-p2p part will probably be taken out before the whole thing goes before the French Senate to sign off on —– and the French Senate doesn’t have to sign off on it anyway: they can send it back to the National Assembly with a "Get Stuffed!" note stuck on the front, (or more, likely a "Va te faire foutre" note).
So everyone who was about to rush off and find a French proxy service, don’t bother.
Yet.
One of the most striking issues of this development is the numbers. Only around 10% of the members of the National Assembly were there for the vote but in total, more than 5% of the people who make the laws in France said file sharing for personal use was a good idea. There may be more, too: 519 of the members of the National Assembly weren’t around to vote, but will get a chance to when the vote is opened up again. So when the the issue comes up again, the people of France will get to see who backs their interests and who sides with the (mainly American) corporations.
One other thing worth noting is the entertainment industry, represented by the likes of Walt Disney, Viacom and News Corp’s Fox, say downloading TV shows and movies will cost them $5 billion in revenue this year. The thing here is: it won’t cost them five billion bucks.
It won’t even cost them five bucks.
It may mean they won’t make $5 billion dollars, but that’s in no way similar to having $5 billion in the bank and having someone come and take it away from you.
Because you can’t lose something you never had in your possession in the first place.
For instance, I didn’t hand over my cash to pay for a Britney Spears CD, so the music store didn’t lose any money. They just didn’t make as much as they might have if I’d bought a Britney Spears CD, which I assure you (and them) will never happen.
This is where the entertainment industry seems to get confused and demonstrates its poor understanding of economics: they expect people will hand over the moolah. Some Hollywood executive wakes up every morning believing that by the end of the day, his company will have sold X million DVDs and X million movie tickets.
Not any more.
The movie studio hasn’t actually lost anything tangible, they simply had poor sales forecasts. They still have the movie sitting on a reel of film somewhere too, so it’s not as if they can’t crank up the projectors in the executive movie theatre and watch the film themselves.
"Someone stole my movie off the internet" is not the same as "someone stole my wallet in the carpark".
I don’t know about you, but I feel insulted when I find out someone was really counting on me to buy something and then gets shitty at me when I don’t. It’s the same feeling I get when a telemarketer phones me up and then calls me an idiot for not jumping at his fantastic deal of a lifetime. The telemarketer should be able to deal with rejection as he’s using an active selling technique where I actually have the opportunity to say "Va te faire foutre", but when big media companies stick up a bunch of posters and run TV commercials and then complain through the nose about how We The People are "stealing" from them, I get really annoyed.
So as and when the French government removes the "legal file sharing" amendment from the DADVSI bill, don’t think of it as a loss to Big Media.
Look at the shitstorm it created and take heart in knowing that governments will soon have to take these issues seriously, just like they had to when the French people rejected the proposed European Constitution in May this year.
Sooner or later, We The People will get what’s due to us.
And it will be sweet.
Alex H, p2pnet – Sydney, Australia
[Alex is an operations manager for an ATM (automatic teller machine) supplier and he specialises in infrastructure development and maintenance, and logistics. He’s also an[other] active member of the Shareaza community.]
December 23rd, 2005 at 3:26 pm
“Sooner or later, We The People will get what’s due to us.”
This is right. file copying for presonal use will have to be made legal because the people will demand it and take it legally or otherwise and by force if necessary.
There is no way that something that cost nothing can be rationed and be expensive and hard to get, or forever lost, as are many records, movies, poems, stories, news, phtographs, etc. When people are told that it is more important to protect the profits of a few nationless corporations, there is absolutely no credibility.
Next will come education. Sure a lot of teaches will loose their classroom jobs to work on something else, and a lot of book publishers will loose their fat book profits and will have to turn to courseware development or to Internet publishing. No one can stop this.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com
December 23rd, 2005 at 3:48 pm
Indeed we will probably not legalize file sharing.
But the idea of the global license (+- the EFF license) is now out and widespread in the public and could become one of the main issue of the 2007 presidential and legislative run.
There are 8.000.000 alleged filesharers in France (A country with 60.000.000) inhabitants. How many of them have a voting card ? Most !
8.000.000, this means 12% of the whole population, and near 16% of the voting population. Definitely enough to make the poll go to one side or to the other.
Filesharers in France (and elsewhere), remember that a voting card is a weapon to fight for our rights !
December 23rd, 2005 at 3:57 pm
1. Movies will be supported by ads embedded within the movie scenes themselves. Advertisers will have to pay to be featured some how in a movie.
2. Movies and music will continue to be made, and those who do the creating willl be the ones to profit. They have to release free content to be recognized. Once recognized and the demand for their works is created, they will release more material when their set fund raising goals are met. In other words, they will release entertainment after enough people donate to their bank account. People will be able to freely copy and distribute any work produced simply because the people producing the work have already been paid for that segment.
3. SINCE DISTRIBUTION WILL BE OVER VARIOUS NETWORKS AND DONE ELECTRONICALLY, THE MIDDLEMEN WILL RECEIVE SIGNIFICANTLY LESS PROFIT.
Once an artists amkes his or her work known and it is accepted, demand for more work will grow. The artist will produce that work when paid. “Piracy” will be eliminated because what does not make it to viewers or listeners cannot be compied and redistributed. It will take at least one or two established, well known artists to advertise this type of business model before it catches on. But, it will catch on sooner or later because filesharing is here to stay, and it will continue to grow. We have won, and so will the artists when they adapt.
December 23rd, 2005 at 5:09 pm
I totally agree with you, guys. Once the music is converted to digital format it should be posted on the net by musicians themselves and it should be free. This is 21 digital century so the technology works against them no matter if they like it or not. If they won’t do it we will do it for them. P2P and BitTorrent are here to stay and as long as this stuff working I am not paying a red cent for music. I am not paying for their rent, food, cars, health insurance either. Let them get real jobs like we have. Who needs CDs anyway. In fact, 320kbs is overkill for portable players as it is. Same goes to software developers. I do not give a damn about their student loans, long hours of work in front of computer, their stupid carpal tunnel disease, lower back problems, impaired vision, radiation and other stuff they lie about. Software must be copied freely too!!!! Movies: that the topic we cannot miss. If Enya was working every f***king day for 5 years on her first CD those movie bastards make a movie in 3-5 months and they want to get millions for it. I say screw them. Prostitution is the same way I should say. I pay the girl, she let me do stuff and as soon as it’s over I have nothing in my hands but bad memories (sometimes it’s actually ok). So, no transaction of goods was made. I have nothing to make a copy from for my friends. It’s like she sold it and she still have it. I am sure we all agree here that little whores are even worse than greedy musicians. At least I can listen a song over and over again, with prostitutes I got nothing. I say whores should be free and get paid by ads they stick on their asses and racks.
December 23rd, 2005 at 6:10 pm
Is this post supposed to be taken seriously?
December 23rd, 2005 at 9:04 pm
What I love in all this, isn’t whether it will pass or not. It’s the idea that governments will either take notice or the people will will. Now the cartels were all for making this tax on blank media. The other part of the deal was ignored and the artists didn’t get paid from the collections and haven’t recieved one penny since they have been collecting these taxes since the days of the cassette. They got their tax and now pretty much every nation in some form or another has these taxes. I don’t hear the cartels offering to either pay the artists (the supposed reason they were collected in the first place) nor do I hear them offering to remove the tax. In fact you are already paying for the ability to copy everytime you buy a blank. If you are buying that blank for backups of computer data, doesn’t come into play.
The cat is out of the bag, in that one nation has already considered this way to return citizen standing to its inhabitants. There will be more and the cartels have a new fire to put out and ride herd on. Suing your customers was never a long term answer and the cartels are aware of it as we are. Until forced to accept what they don’t want, this mess will continue. Short of greed, there is no reason for this to be the way it is. Why they don’t want this sort of tax is that it will be far harder to jack the prices when they have to go to the governments with hat in hand to discuss it.
Not long ago it was in the articles that the cartels want to jack the price yet again on digital downloads. It doesn’t make sense to raise the prices to anyone but the cartels. This sort of law isn’t saying that they won’t pay the cartels, it is saying that that a blanket fee would replace the payment on line for non profit uses and personal enjoyment. It is in my mind that the cartels need a bit of jacking down on their highhandness, just over the payolla deal. Because of the payolla that has extisted, even after it was ruled illegal, FM radio has become a vast waste land. There is no where to go to hear the new music, in an accepted public format. Used to be that radio was where you did that. Now it is p2p and p2p is nothing but free advertisement for the cartels. If anything, they should be paying us for listening.
December 24th, 2005 at 2:24 am
It all depends on how much lobbying the French govt will allow the cartels to use. Hopefully they’ll be suitably outraged at being dictated too by foreign interests that they’ll legalise it just to piss the cartels off.
At the very least they should demand an immediate audit into all royalty payments to french artists by these companies. I’m sure that’d make the cartels back off real quick.
December 24th, 2005 at 4:00 am
“It all depends on how much lobbying the French govt will allow the cartels to use”
What do you think about people from virginmega wearing ministry of culture badges offering worth $10 free-downloads cards to our representatives just before the vote ?
That’s what happened !
December 24th, 2005 at 7:44 pm
December 24th, 2005 at 7:45 pm
THNX 2 FRANCE I WILL DOWNLOAD AS MUCH AS I CAN.THX AGAIN
December 25th, 2005 at 12:25 pm
“Is this post supposed to be taken seriously?”
As the writer of the post you are replying, I would really like to hear your opinion on the question of:
There is no way that something that cost nothing can be rationed and be expensive.
Perhaps you can enlighten us that do not understand your way of thinking or doing your job.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com