Imagine a nation with a drug problem. It spends billions of dollars traveling overseas, trying to eradicate cocaine fields. As it wipes out one field in one country the growers move to another field in another country. The nation in question keeps playing whack-a-mole. Meanwhile, drug laws are so lax and and unenforced in that nation that millions use illegal drugs, keeping up the demand for the cocaine and ensuring production will continue regardless of eradication efforts.

Crazy, eh? Well, that's been US drug policy for decades. And now it appears it may be the French approach to "protecting" copyrighted works.

An article in the EE Times discusses the upcoming May 4 French Senate debate on its copyright legislation, which has been much discussed and derided here and elsewhere. One of the absurdities of the bill is that it mandates interoperability for music players. There's no French law (that I know of) that requires a Puegeot radiator to work in a Renault automobile, but its unfair to the consumer to have iTunes songs only play on iPods, and have MP3s be the only other format permitted on iPods. Sacre bleu!

But as I have written, there's more to the legislation than that. Ostensibly an effort to harmonize French law with the EU, what the bill in fact proposes to do is all but legalize the demand market for unauthorized works while ostensibly pursuing the supply. Note this from Junko Yoshida's story:

The French law offers leniency to users who download music and other files illegally, while cracking down on software developers who write and distribute programs to crack DRM protection.

Well, I'm sure that will work quite well. I'm willing to bet nearly all software developers writing and distributing the DRM cracking code that French citizens will use will be outside of France, while nearly all French citizens using those tools to crack DRM and share content without authorization will be in France. So this is a cute way of saying the French have IP laws without actually having to enforce any of them.

Apple has a lot of cash, and a lot of allies in this fight. I remain skeptical that anything that forces open the iPod will become law, even if some in the US would like that to happen to create a precedent for similar action in the US. But it's altogether possible that a quasi-legalization of unauthorized file-sharing could occur in France, an anti-MGM v. Grokster if you will. No surprise, the notion of French being contrarians, but they also like to mock US failures and setbacks. Perhaps they should look at the US war on drugs, have a good laugh, then ask if they want to replicate that model in the copyright realm.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 2:22 PM | DMCA, International

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