French Court OKs Suits Against P2P Vendors

Ars Technica reports: Unable to target most file-swappers directly, France's Société civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (SPPF) has gone after four creators of P2P software instead, and its efforts to prosecute Vuze, Morpheus, Limewire, and Shareaza on French soil have just received the go-ahead from the Parisian Tribunal de Grande Instance.

French law allows for much broader private copying than does American fair use law, but at the cost of a private copying levy imposed on blank media. Because of this and other features of French law, the music industry in France has not generally targeted file-swappers directly. Under the controversial DADVSI copyright legislation (the same law that included the yet-to-be-used provisions forcing DRM vendors to supply interoperability information to other vendors), however, both the creators and distributors of P2P programs could face criminal penalties over their software, and it is this new provision that the SPPF hopes to use.

The group, which represents French record producers, filed suit against Vuze, Morpheus, and Shareaza (Sourceforge is also named, since it serves as the distributor for the open-source program) in 2007. Limewire was added later in the year. The case was initially stalled over the question of whether French courts could have jurisdiction over foreign software makers who gave their software away freely on the Internet to users from any country in the world, but the court concluded that it had the necessary jurisdiction and cleared the way for the case to proceed.

Should SPPF win the case against the four, the law provides for criminal penalties of up to E300,000 and up to three years in jail. It also allows groups like SPPF to force the companies to adopt some method of filtering copyrighted works from their systems. (Side note: users are also instructed to secure their own Internet connections, an apparent attempt to stop the "open WiFi defense" from being trotted out in court.)

Limewire and Vuze are interesting targets, as both have sought to "go legit" for the last couple of years by launching online stores of their own. Vuze was one of the companies, in fact, complaining to the FCC in the recent Comcast P2P blocking case, arguing that Comcast was essentially interfering with a legal business that competed with Comcast's own video delivery system.

Similar cases in the US have sometimes gone against file-sharing programs, especially the famous 9-0 2005 Supreme Court decision against Grokster. The issues there were similar to the ones that French courts are now considering, especially when it comes to determining whether software was designed and promote to aid in infringement.

In France, DADVSI bans the distribution of "un logiciel manifestement destiné à la mise à disposition du public non autorisée d'oeuvres ou d'objets protégés," so the same judgments will have to made about whether each of the four apps in question is manifestement designed to aid in illegal content distribution. Given the various business models of the four applications, that may be a bit more difficult to prove than it was in the Grokster case.

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