France legalizes music file trading
15 January 2006
At a late-night session of parliament last month an ad hoc coalition of deputies managed to pass an amendment to a draft law on copyright. It would make France the first country to legalise the online sharing of music. The shock amendment – which would allow web-users to exchange as much copyrighted material as they want as long as it was for private use and they paid a few euros a month to a collective artists’ pot – has delighted associations of internet users and horrified record companies and the government, which is now trying to overturn it. “A creation, like any work, requires fair remuneration; it can’t be free if its author doesn’t want it to be,” said Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, culture minister, last week. He went on to insist that “short-term solutions” – implying the amendment’s proposed minimal subscription fee – “might seem attractive but very quickly?.?.?.?they would drain creativity and kill cultural diversity”. This is certainly the view of most artists. Johnny Hallyday, the veteran rocker, said a collective pot of money would stifle creativity by not rewarding individuals for their work.I could easily imagine a system like BMI/ASCAP that monitors file trading activity and rewards money from the pot based on that. So not tracking individual file transfers, but just general activity. The fees could come through the internet providers themselves. You could license usage on a particular port. Of course people would always find ways to get around that and try to trade files for free on other ports. http://news.ft.com/cms/s/fe77daa4-85df-11da-bee0-0000779e2340.html
