French Record Labels Suing Sourceforge, Among Others

by Kristin Shoemaker - Nov. 18, 2008Comments (9)

If you thought the RIAA had cornered the market on heavy-handed, misguided lawsuits, think again. TorrentFreak reports that the Societe civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (SPPF) plan on pursuing a lawsuit against three US-based companies that develop P2P applications. Vuze, LimeWire, and Shareaza are the applications targeted in the lawsuit. There is a fourth company named that's not a developer, or a P2P site -- it's a repository.

It's actually not just any repository. It is, for many, the repository for open source applications -- Sourceforge.

Is it me, or does this lawsuit sound incredibly tenuous (to use a polite term)? New French legislation suggests that for P2P applications to be in the clear they must have the ability to filter and block the transfer of unauthorized copyrighted material. The problem is, this type of filter doesn't exist (and judging from other types of filtering software, would take literally years to get to a point where it would be even reasonably accurate). It seems, then, yes, the courts have given the record labels the go ahead to sue application developers for features that don't exist, and might not ever be a technological reality.

The icing on this cookie is including Sourceforge in the suit. Follow along: Sourceforge hosts Shareaza (among others), and though using Shareaza (or Vuze, or Limewire) doesn't mean you're violating copyrights, you could be, and Sourceforge has the servers that host these applications' code. Why stop there? Why can't they sue the telecom that maintain the lines that connect Sourceforge's servers to the Internet?

It seems that any progress made on the digital rights front is a two steps forward one step back type of situation. This case, no matter how you look at it, is just really bad footing.


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9 Comments
 

Oui! Oui! Losers... Stick to wine and cheese and leave the legal wranglings and real work to us...


0 Votes

Wow - this is whack! They cannot possibly be serious? Are they suing in French courts? What do they want SF to do?


0 Votes

IP block all of France from sourceforge.


0 Votes

MSFT : You stupid idiot.


1 Votes

Wow. This is absurd! What are they going to do next - sue Google for helping you find torrents??


0 Votes

anonymous@ "IP block all of France from sourceforge." FTR, several major open-source projects (many of which are hosted on sourceforge) have their headquarters in France. the most obvious one (for me): VLC media Player. that kind of thinking (see quote above) is IMO one of the big reasons why politics are screwed up- that is, making decisions without considering the consequences. Although VLC does use sourceforge anymore (it used to, to some extent), many projects that use VLC code (for example, songbird) are hosted there, so that would definitely be a problem.


0 Votes

Utterly stupid. Why not require all email clients to have fraud-filtering plugins, or all web-browsers to have content-filtering built in? Wow, that would solve all our problems!


Attention record labels: Technology gave you a viable business model. Now technology took that model away. Stop making that everyone else's problem.


1 Votes

What would my responce be?


To: Societe civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France


Dear bureaucrats,


As you are aware I do NOT live in France, I am not a citizen of your country and I have never agreed to follow your idiotic laws. Since I do not live in France I am not subject to your crazy fricken laws. You are however free to prosecute your poor subjects that download this software and that are beholden to this stupid law.


Go away.

-me


1 Votes

It would be really interesting to know what percentage of "illegal" downloads using services like Vuze, Limewire, etc. are for FRENCH CONTENT?


I'd imagine that its less than 5% of the content. The SPPF, instead of trying to protect that content, should focus on making it more ubiquitous and marketing the heck out of it before it dies out like the rest of industries (thanks again to protectionism and really inane labor laws)...


0 Votes
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