French Ip news
France plans Agency to boot out File Sharers-February 2009
In Europe, intellectual property infringements have become tolerated but only as far as infringers do not exceed the ‘three strikes’ offence by the presence of civil rights benefits accorded to the ordinary citizens. But now, France is going against the trend by formalizing legislations to punish infringers via a government agency, bypassing the norm of asking ISP’s to monitor their users.
The new French agency would act as the intermediary between copyright holders and ISPs. If a copyright holder believes that someone is infringing on copyrights, it would send the info to the agency, which would investigate, get info from the ISP, and send out a threat letter to the individual infringers. The agency would also have the ability to demand that an ISP cut a user off for repeat offenses. It is however not clear as to what constitutes a repeat offender. There are also no indications as to why the government is involved in such matters as there are already adequate laws to bring infringers to court in France.
Copyright infringements have always been the hot topic for the Medias, but have been highly disputed by internet users. From the point of view of the man in the street, there is very little infringement to talk about as they were just copying for their own fair usages. Further more, most of these files, mostly music and movies that are found on the internet has already been paid for. It is hard to prove that any theft has occurred. Certainly no governments should be seen as facilitating the copyright holders to bring about punishments to so called ‘infringers’ when there are other more important things to do!
50 billion dollars is no piece of cake!
French President Nicolas Sarkozy just announce a 50 billion US dollar fund injection for the ailing French economy, saying that money is long due for vital areas like research and developments and bio- technologies. Much of the funds will however go to the universities with research bodies second in importance. Small and medium industries are also targeted as well as the digital economy. The president sees the fund as vital to pump prime the economy which has been severely affected by the world financial crisis and equates the input as like the Marshall plan after the end of the Second World War. It is that serious and by the end of the next decade, France should see itself having top rated universities, just like their counterparts over the other side of the Atlantic.
December 21, 2009.