Why a government should make a law like that? There are several possible answers and none is good. Because it's ignorant of the nature of the net. Because it has more care for the interests of companies than those of citizens. Because will use it for reasons of censorship. The law of which we speak is the new French law against "piracy" on the Internet passed by the French on the insistence of Sarkozy government.
According to this law, individuals who illegally download copyrighted content such as music, books or videos will receive two notices to warn them to stop and if they will not, a very high fine and the suspension of the Internet connection up to one year. The bill had already been rejected once by French Constitutional Council because foresaw that an administrative body, the Hadopi, could take action against users without trial. Now, however, not much is changed since the measure will be taken by judicial decree, without possibility to defend oneself. The French Constitutional Council then is once again the last barrier to stop the law, already criticized by the European Union because access to the net is now considered a fundamental right such as freedom of expression, and cannot be stopped. The same reason for which also Reporters Sans Frontieres, the famous French association denouncing abuses against press freedom in the world, has condemned this law, which goes far beyond the imagination of many authoritarian regimes.
Francesco Defferrari
With the anti-piracy law could be punished even people who have only visited a site of illegal downloads without downloading anything, or someone who hasn't "supervised" his network and his computers used by others to download. In short, this law end up criminalizing a huge number of French citizens.
But above all this goes against the principle of the laws created to protect copyrights, designed in the course of 1800 to prevent unscrupulous publishers to publish books illegally without paying the authors. In the case of downloading via internet what lacks precisely is the purpose of profit. Download is like to watch a movie on TV or listen to the radio and cannot be considered a crime, because at the end, the sense of the existence of the Internet is precisely that of being able to copy and share information easily, even music and video. If that doesn't pay royalties to whoever owns them, that's a problem that must be solved not by users but by access providers: search engines and Internet service providers. But obviously for the majors to fight users is easier than wage a war against several other industries. This is a wrong battle and meaningless, that will be finally defeated, as demonstrated by the growth of "Pirate Parties" in northern Europe, where governments are creating ever more absurd and punitive laws, while in Sweden it is discovered that the judges involved in the crusade against Pirate Bay have strange friendships with majors.
Incidentally there are also many reasons why the download is necessary, for example, find music, films or tv series that in some countries never arrived or are impossible to buy or censored. But of course if the internet would charge every single piece of audio, each film, book or newspaper article all mankind would stop using it. The net have to be a platform for free sharing, fees should be paid through licensing, if anything, not by users but by ISPs and search engines. The industries of music and movies, strangled by a crisis they created themselves due to poor quality of their most advertised products and overcome by technology and by their inability to adapt to it, ask for help to governments. And many governments, as in France, willingly sell themselves to the majors to lead a reactionary battle against people, freedom, democracy, and against the present and the future.
Francesco Defferrari
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