France Votes Down Punitive Anti-File Sharing Measure

I believe this is very good news. Read the full story here.

An excerpt;

Under the proposed legislation, new powers would have been granted to music and film companies to enable them to monitor internet users and report illegal downloads to a new copyright protection agency.

Anyone found to have broken the law would have been traced via their IP (internet protocol) address and handed up to three warnings before their connection was severed for up to a year. Offenders would have had to keep paying for their internet connection despite it having been cut off

.

As I understand it–and I am not a lawyer, much less a French lawyer–under the terms of the proposed law, the French government would have, for all practical purposes, given private companies the right to operate as vigilantes.

I am convinced that the music industry is wasting its time trying to stop file-sharing; it’s like trying to stop jay-walking in Center City Philadelphia. All that happens is a few poor persons get stuck with tickets and hassles, while thousands of jaywalkers continue to flow back and forth across Market Street during the lunch hour. (And, in defense of the jaywalkers, if they waited for the cars to clear the intersection, they’d never make it to that lunch cart on the other side of Market).

Similarly, a few persons who may or may not be actually sharing copyrighted files get nailed, but the Gulf Stream of electrons continues to flow.

In effect, the music and film industry manage to exact vengeance on the occasional person, but they don’t stop file-sharing.

They really must find a new strategy; they are trying to make the computer age go away, and it’s just not going to happen.

Full Disclosure: No one in my house uses peer-to-peer file-sharing to do anything other than download free and open-source Linux distributions. No music, no movies, no nothing like that.