new licensing model

[Philippe Verdy]

From: "Matthew Seth Flaschen" <superm40 at comcast.net>
>> Also I consider copyright as a fundamental human right (for everyone) - it 
>> should not be even registered according the law of many countries. To be the 
>> right and since the web has not national borders a proper scheme relevant to 
>> this reality must be established to stop the war between content authors and 
>> users. Tell me who can win this war and why we must spend resources for legal 
>> "weapon" instead of legal peace? 

Note that the newFrench law on copyrigtht and derived or neighbouring rights (which will be the French implementation of the European EUDC directive adopted in 2001), if voted in a few days (by an emergency procedure at the parlement during an exceptional nightly session, without any prior debate!), will REQUIRE registration of all published work, and even require a legal deposit (including for all web sites).

For audio/video contents, the legal depot will be the INA (Institut National de l'Audiovisuel). For other contents, it will be a new institution managed by the Bibliothène Nationale de France. This legal depot is not free in France (you need to pay a tax for conservation).

If the web site has its own domain name, the domainholder will need to register it (it will be required for all .fr domain names, andprobably paidalong with the domain registration or renewal fee). Ifthe domain is hosted by a service provider, the legal deposit will be made by the provider and paid by it and part of the service billing.

The existing web content in the .fr hierarchy will be indexed (no matter the robots.txt exclusion for  the default homepages of every websites) and archived as proof of existence.

The law means that it will become illegal to freely publish files even if we are the authors, without paying the new legal deposit (public domain will be definitely banned in France). New law amendments are constantly being added now everyday, pushed by major content producers to further restrict the user rights. What is very bad is that none of these amendments will be discussed, they just require a (flawed) justification or mitigation (we see lots of obligations, but no compensation for the loss of rights).

I really hope that the law will be inapplicable, and judged rapidly anticonstitutional under the French and European courts, because it will be clearly unbalanced, andeven opposed to the many balancing options that were considered during the discussions of the EUDC directive. Starting at Christmas and during the next months where decrees will be published tospecify its conditions of application, France will have the most repressive laws in the world that will give a tremendous power to a new form of privatized justice made directly by major content producers.

This will not even give an enormous commercial advantage to the international majors face to independant new small businesses, but it will clearly severely limit the freedom of speech for individual citizens, that will have to pay to use their constitutional rights. This will severely undermine all attempts to create or work on any open-source project from France (the French law is applicable to private or coporate residents on the territory, independantly of their nationality, but also extends partly for all other residences and activities performed abroad by residents).

Once again, France will adopt a law and will have to face its most important problem : no way to apply and enforce this law. This further increases the confusion, and in fact will not help fight against infringement. This law will probably have the reverse effect, with somany other unapplied and inconsistent laws, many just thinking that not accepting the law is more honorable.