The HADOPI law wants to modify the way internet is used in France by creating sanctions to illegal downloading like stopping internet connection of "pirates" after a paper mail warning.
The law is currently at "assemblée nationale" for review. One piece of law was just voted. It allows France to modify results of search engines to promote legal offers from music majors at the top of SERP. There is a possibility that this could lead to filtering of results to prevent access to illegal or not approved (by majors) websites (jamendo ?).
China is now nearer than before! |
This law is the reason why several French websites are wearing all black currently.
The biggest problem here is not because it's a bad and stupid law --- everybody know it – but it's made both by lobbies of music editors (really powerful in France) and by incompetent ministers who don't know what is Internet is. One of them didn't know about "Web 2.0" while several others "prefer BitTorrent to Peer To Peer" (they don't know the first one IS the second, they just head that P2P was bad).
Yes, it will cause many problems, and this is just the beginning. |
In France most politicians think its ok to punish an all group of people because one of them didn’t abide by the law. The French parliament has just voted a law that allows cutting the internet line of a group of people, a family or a business, if one of them downloads content without paying the copyright. If they want to avoid losing their internet line the French will have to spy on other members of their family or business to stop any illegal behavior related to copyright. Artist in France are much more clever than anywhere else (except maybe China or the ex Soviet Union). The French already pay many taxes that are supposed to offset the loss of income due to the infringement of copyright. Non only they pay taxes but they pay huge amounts of money (those who work in the private sector) through their social assurance premium to allow hundreds of thousands of artists to get paid for nine months by the social insurance system when they have really work for three months (“Regime des intermitents du spectacle”) . At the time where you can be robbed, raped or injured with impunity in big areas where millions of people live without any protection of the state (the police refuse to go there because it’s too dangerous) it’s certainly more important to remind to the French that copying music on the internet is the ultimate crime! It’s what does any teenager. Not surprising that in France medias use the word “ les jeunes” (meaning young people) to say punk or tout. You could imagine that so much money invested in French artist would encourage creativity! As a matter of fact where are our Bach Mozart or Vinci (a time when copyright didn’t exist.) Sure the creativity has never been so low but artist have never been more convinced that France need a more powerful state system (In France the state system get only 52 % of the total income) |
