Liberté? Egalité? Fraternité?

France consumated it's marriage to the media industry this week with approval of the Hadopi law allowing internet users to be cut off from the Internet without going through the courts.. based purely on accusations from the media industry. To add insult to injury people having their internet service withdrawn are still required to pay their subscription... (if that bit made it to the final legislation?)

Details seem hard to find - but apparently the only way to prove your innocence is to accept the installation of government spyware. And failing to accept installation of the software will be taken as evidence of guilt.

Innocent until proven guilty? The right to remain silent? The right to a fair trial even....

It's scary how basic rights and principles arebeing trampled over in the rush to clamp down on copyright infringement. And curious that when half the Internet users in France are breaking current copyright law that the politicians haven't wondered whether they shouldn't be looking at whether the law (and the principles behind it) are due for some serious reform...

The ray of light in this particular dark tunnel is that this legislation conflicts with recent EU decisions to forbid exclusion from the internet without judicial review.. French MEP Guy Bono has said he will ask the European Commission to instigate a lawsuit against France if the law is not first thrown out by a French constitutional court.

My commiserations also to Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim who was sacked from his job working with internet innovation within French broadcaster TF1 after an email written to his MP opposing the bill ended up with his employer (after having been forwarded to the culture ministry). Let's add free speech to the endangered species list.......

The scent of sanity in Paris

If I ring my mates to organise a bank raid no one really expects my phone company to end up in court... ..and if I decide my finances need a boost and send out a bunch of fake invoices to a few unsuspecting companies it's not the post office that finds itself in the dock. So why is it that in intellectual property crime the rights holders seem to think the operators and application service providers are fair game for lawsuits and other bullying?

In verdict that has that scent of sanity eBay have just won a case in France against L'Oreal over sales of counterfeit perfumes - basically saying they are not responsible for whether or not goods advertised on their site are genuine or not. More pragmatically, I think the verdict actually means that the court was satisfied that eBay are doing enough to fulfil any duty to protect the public and rights holders from fraudulent advertising.

Of course if we adopted the media industry principle we could see people seeking damages from billboard companies that allowed advertising for cigarettes, and car showrooms up in court for aiding and abetting reckless driving... we could even see consumers being sued because they're sending firms bankrupt by not buying their products.

Tell me this is not true...

So you go to court and are found guilty and sentenced to prison and a fine -but you appeal - and also ask for a retrial because the judge has an apparent conflict of interest.  

And then, even before they have set a date for an appeal, they send you the bill for the fine and are ready to freeze your assets and send the bailiffs in.  Geeze, if this was a TV series I'd say they were making it up.  But no... it's just the latest bizarre turn in The Pirate Bay trial.  

..of course the sentence was prison and a fine - and while they want the money now... they don't have to go to prison until the verdict has been tested at appeal.

Are you sure this is not a wind-up?  I always had this idea that justice systems were supposed to just...

This is not the party you are looking for..

Aftonbladet have a nifty link to a 30 question test that will map your political views and compare them to EU political parties - either those where you live - or in Europe as a whole. There's just one small thing they forgot to mention. In the Aftonbladet version of the test they have cut three Swedish parties off the list- which to say, they have actively edited out three of the parties standing in next month's election -ostensibly because they don't currently hold seats in the EU parliament.

If you want to try the uncensored version of the test you can find it over at EU Profiler. Jolly good fun it is too.... apparently I ought to be voting for the Luxembourg Communist Party!

(Oh yes.. the three missing parties: Sverige Demokraterna, Feministisk Initiativ & Piratpartiet)

More or less sustainable...

Sitting on the tube this morning I read in the paper that a trip by car gives out 30 000 times the emissions of the same trip on the tube - which here runs on renewable electricity... Or, to put it another way, I can commute on the tube each day for 125 years for the same emissions as a single day's commute by car.

125 years! ... Or one day. Which did you choose today?

Money for nothing?

I came across a link at 'The Brand Man' to an interesting report by Handelshøyskolen BI in Norway on downloading of music and CD sales - a consumer survey comparing CD purchases, paid and free downloads from May to November 2008.

What it shows is that young people (15-20yrs) are twice as likely to download music as the rest of us - whether free or paid for. But the really interesting statistic is that young people that donload free music use paid downloads around ten times as much as their peers that don't download.

Less marked, but still of interest is that in the rest of the population people using free downloads are buying around 10% more CDs than those that don't download. (People of all ages paying for downloaded music also buy more CDs)

People that go looking for music are interested in music.... not really rocket science. But it does highlight that by targetting people downloading music for free the music industry is most probably attacking their best customers......

Hot (green) air on the tube

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Checkout Zaproot on Youtube.



In this episode... how Swedes are getting hot under the collar...