James Delahunty
8 Feb 2006 4:14
A French ruling made in December but just publicised now, regarded the use of P2P networks as legal as long as it was for personal and not commercial use. The ruling applied to both downloading and uploading copyrighted files. It started when Anthony G was taken to court by lobby group Société Civile des Producteurs Phonographiques (SCPP) for allegedly making 1,875 copyrighted music and movie files available on the FastTrack network (through use of Kazaa software) during 2004.
Another lobby group, L'Association des Audionautes, defended the user. "On September 21, 2004, the prosecutor's office found 1,875 MP3 and DivX files on the defendant's hard drive. Based on this discovery, a French record producer association known as the SCPP (Société Civile des Producteurs Phonographiques) sued him for downloading and uploading 1,212 music tracks." the group said.
"The District Court of Paris, however, refused to agree with the SCPP's argument. Following the line of reasoning utilised by the ADA for nearly two years, the Judges decided that these acts of downloading and uploading qualified as 'private copying'", it added. This decision is being publicised as the French parliament meets to discuss whether P2P use will be legalised as long as a fee of about 5 euro is paid each month.
The verdict is being appealed but L'Association des Audionautes is confident that a higher court will uphold the decision.
Source:
The Register