France to legalise file sharing?
In a late-night session, a small group of French MPs have voted for what common sense has suggested for years now – that peer to peer file sharing should be legal provided users who want to fileshare pay a small monthly levy on top of their internet subscription to compensate copyright holders. Although only about 10% of the French Parliament was present, and the amendment faces a tough time as the French ‘culture minister’ (as in Britain and the US, this means ‘copywrong cartel lapdog’) has asked parliament to re-open the debate, and even if this doesn’t happen the amendment could still be rejected by the Senate.
See Also
- International Herald Tribune (contains some inaccuracies, but fuller report)
- P2PNet
December 24th, 2005 at 6:45 pm
Since when has common sense indicated that the rights of the owner of property be forced into something that they don’t necessarily want and can’t set a price for?
December 24th, 2005 at 8:24 pm
Because copyright is supposed to be a ‘deal’ between the people and the content creator, but given that current copyright laws are so skewed towards the content creator the ‘deal’ concept (since a deal is supposed to be even sided) has been seriously weakened.
The original point of the ‘deal’ was to give exclusive rights of commercial exploitation to the creator of content, e.g. if A writes a novel, B can’t sell it without his/her permission, NOT that if B gives a copy, gratis, to C, a 12-year old girl, that A would be able to force C’s parents to pay $3000. This French law would restore the original purpose of copyright because only non-commercial sharing would be covered (e.g. you couldn’t SELL someone else’s creation and get out of liability simply by using BitTorrent as the distribution mechanism).
EDIT: The non-commercial part wasn’t in the post, I realise, but I think it’s in the IHT article
December 25th, 2005 at 12:02 am
The point of copyright is NOT “to give exclusive rights of commercial exploitation to the creator of content”. Not directly, anyway. Copyright is in place to protect the interests of the people. By giving creators commercial protection (as you suggest), the real goal of creating works of public interest is accomplished. When the copyright expires (all copyright law has an expiry date for a reason), the masses benefit by inheriting the work entire.
Now while the example you cite of being charged for receiving a book is clearly against common sense, it’s not comparable with file sharing. A more fair analogy would be A creating a book, B buying it, B then making an identical copy and passing that to C, and B/C being charged a large sum of money. To be honest, that’s common sense to me: if you break the rights of the owner to stop copying of their works (pretty much the definition of “copyright”), you’ve broken your end of the deal and deserve the punishment.
By removing the right from the creator to control the spread of their works for that time period, you ultimately remove the benefits to the public. That would be a bad thing.
December 27th, 2005 at 2:39 pm
Sorry, I realise my previous comment was ambiguous, but what I meant was a PHOTOcopy of the book (not the actual copy that B had purchased).
The expiry date argument really fails seeing as the term of copyright protection (in the USA, I don’t know what the UK term is but it’s probably much the same thanks very much EU Copyright Directive) is now 70 years after the author’s death.
If noncommercial sharing was allowed, people will still buy music - they’ll want the packaging, the physical object, and the greater sound quality that a CD can offer - sure, a 128kbps MP3 file (still the near-ubitquitous format for P2P files) is fine on my portable audio player, but I still want a full quality (1440kbps) version of the sound for hooking up to my surround sound speakers.
This argument [that noncommercial sharing will not kill content creators' profits] is surely proved by the fact that at the moment, three times as many people use p2p file sharing networks to download music as use the corporate downloan sites, yet CD sales are INCREASING. Most films are out on BitTorrent before they’re out in the cinema, yet DVD sales are INCREASING. Surely if what you say is true (about noncommercial sharing harming the creator, and ultimately harming the public) then the opposite would be true?
PS: Apologies for the late response Thunderbird marked the comment notification email as spam for some fuckwit reason