France's Extremely Brief Experiment With Legalized File Sharing

Surprises

from the how-long-will-this-last? dept

Talk about an about face! Yesterday, we noted that France was considering a bill that would put file sharers in jail for three years, despite their courts saying personal file sharing was legal and musicians begging the industry to stop suing their fans. Late last night, we added a short update to that post, noting a story coming out that France had actually gone the other way (surprising just about everyone) and passed a nearly completely opposite amendment that said private, non-commercial file sharing was just fine (supporting the earlier court ruling). Today, more details are coming out, and it sounds like this move won’t last very long. Amusingly, the apoplectic recording industry representative says: “The deputies used this vote to show their independence from the government, but they don’t know what they are doing.” First of all, we were under the impression that the French Parliament was the government — and it seems pretty clear that they do know what they’re doing, which is trying to send a message that the overreaching efforts of the industry are a problem. Of course, there’s very little likelihood that this amendment stands. The actual vote was done late at night, with just a small number of the members of Parliament present. It’s quite likely that the debate will be reopened today, and the amendment ditched — and then we’ll be back to talking about prison time for music fans.