France set to cut Web access for music, film pirates

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There's a good deal ! Not so bad

The deal is that the new system (which is developed on the ground of the French DADVSI law, which mostly focussed on the most important abusers that made illegal commerce of pirated contents but failed to stop piracy made by individual users) will mean the end of DRM:
* First, there's a parity commission created to study the ISP contracts and protect the consumer rights. It defines a charter describing which actions an ISP can legitimately do against an abuser.
* Second, the existing laws that only permit action by justice is not applicable to the many individual users: it's really too expensive, counter-productive, and even the french courts could not support so many actions; instead proofs are collected by private organizations that need to contact the ISP; the ISP alone can act directly against some abuser by producing the necessary proofs.
* Third, the ISP will inform the user that what he does is illegal, ordering him to stop. Several escalating measures will be taken.
* No internet access will be stopped before there's been an attempt to stop the abuse and without informing the user.
* A personnal letter will be sent by postal mail to a user informing him that he's got a last chance before their account is blocked.
* The measures will escalate: from a temporary blocking to a permanent closure of the user account and subscription.

But there's a deal: this will come at the same time as DRM being completely REMOVED in France (this is already starting to be the case, within almost all major music and film online distribution platforms).

So the deal is cear: you'll get unprotected medias, great for your privacy and freedom of use on any device of your choice, at the price of monitoring only the illegal downloads.

By avoiding courts, everybody wins, including the abusers, because legal actions are expensive for everyone. It will allow faster resolution of conflicts, and in fine, there will be more products available online, an increased offer of medias, a larger market, and new competitive offers for packages at lower prices.

The good news behing this is the promise, made by the government but also by the majors, that they will provide DRM-free medias. So it will ensure portability of your purchases to newer technologies and it will also save money for the legal consumers.

There are many other systems being proposed, as well, notably the possibility of keeping a portable remote portfolio of your purchased licences. With this personal portfolio, you'll be enable to download again your media in case of loss or alteration, from anyone, by just being able to demonstrate that the downloading user has a legal right to download a backup copy from anyone having it.

Some other systems considered would include the possibility to transfer or exchange the licences between users through their online portfolio. This will effectively restore what we could do with books or non-digital medias: tired of some music? exchange it with others interested in it, or resell it: you just need to transfer definitevely your licence. Licences would become non nominative and such transfers would become legal for non-professional personal use and non-public broadcasting.

The only important thing for media producers will be to get enough licences sold so that their production becomes financed. So this will promote the creation of more content.

Note that the media producers (or right owners) have promissed to reopen their catalog to offer a richer palette of contents, instead of keeping them largely closed to anyone.

It seems really that the media producers are making significant progresses: they have understood that DRM is no longer the path to go. They need to adopt the digital age in a technology-neutral way.

Posted by: PhilippeV   Posted on: 11/26/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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