AfterDawn: News

France to moderate punishments for P2P offenses

The French government is currently mulling over changes to the country's copyright laws, in regard to Internet piracy. Under current laws in France, downloading copyrighted material illegally could get you up to three years in prison and a fine up to €300,000. The Justice minister is now recommending that the punishment be adjusted to better suit the actual offense.

For P2P developers, this means that distributing and promoting P2P tools for copyright infringement purposes be punishable by up to three years in jail and a fine of €300,000. However, the difference between actually writing legitimate tools to share digital data and producing tools made and promoted solely for copyright infringement must be noted, though this is a "difference" that may need to be defined by a court of law.



However, those who share files on P2P networks would also be affected by the changes. The punishment for an offense would depend on many factors, including "time frame" of infringement, "willingness" to engage in the dissemination of content. Users who only download files would be the least punished, with jail time ruled out except in cases of re-offending and uploading the content to other users etc.

Source:
Slyck

Written by: James Delahunty @ 10 Mar 2007 19:39

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• 3 comments

• georgeluv

  funny that they actualy mention that downloading wont warrent jail time unless you re-offend. even in america not one downloader has ever been sued or charged or anything. going after downloaders is not economicly viable becuase it would cost the record companies sooooooo much because the return would be no where near 3,000 bucks.

  11.3.2007 07:31 #1

• scorpNZ

  Going after downloaders would put them in a sticky situation since everything you view even on a web page has to be downloaded and is copyrighted but all industries etc have signed chits allowing for your comp to download said content free of prosecution,they can only get you when you use there content without permission like posting an article on a site without the link to original or something like that,lets get back to the RIAA they know who,when,where, what content is being uploaded and downloaded when it comes to P2P, their software is that good at tracking,there was a tv documentry here in NZ last year about catching the uploaders and they showed it in action they caught a number of uploaders with it.

  11.3.2007 17:33 #2

• borhan9

  I just commented on the Canadian French resistance maybe Canada will do it when they see their mother country lead the way.
  
  I say get these criminals to get work for the governments they break the laws in because they are soo good in breaking the system down. They can help fight against the illegal actions. But on the other hand they are going to be seen as rats that have converted to the other side.

  12.3.2007 16:49 #3