Herve Cuviliez

I cannot end up that week without talking about what’s going on in france regarding P2P networks usage.

if you are not familiar with the subject you can read this excellent article from ars technica: French anti-P2P law toughest in the world

Don’t get me wrong my point here is not to advocate for piracy, every talented content creator deserve to get the harvest fruits of their work.

But to denounce an industry that misbehaved for the past 2 decades and the clueless lawmakers influenced by music/video industry lobbies.

To better understand the situation

we need to take a closer look at their business model. If you think, they make their biggest profit on original content creation and talent detection, you are all wrong.
Music industry (same for video) makes most of their profit by moving from one medium to another audiotape to CD, videotape to DVD, etc.. so you have to buy again and again the same album (I bought some albums 3 times: audiotape, CD, iTunes). This has nothing to do with content creation. Everybody was happy, money was flooding without any work except burning some CDs. That was good old times.

Then came a problem: Internet. Information became medium free, distribution worldwide, and file exchange standards emerged. it took them sometimes to understand the importance of the phenomena. They were to concentrate at resampling songs and creating best of with their already produced music.

When they understood it, their first reaction was how can we stop this not how can we benefit from it. So they created the DRM. a “smart way to recreate medium but they went to far. The music you were buying on iTunes was no playable on you Nokia mobile, and having it on two PC was an nightmare.

They forgot 2 things in their masterplan: Internet has no boundaries, so there is no way to stop the information (except if you live in china) and the most important one: Customers are not stupid.

How you can explain to a customer that from now, you can only listen to your music on the device you used to buy it. Even with a CD, I was able to play it in my car, at home or at a friend place…. and with the digital music, you (music industry) try to explain me that I don’t have that right anymore! NO WAY so I have to find another way to enjoy my music freely. the other way are P2P networks.

that’s why I started downloading from P2P networks, and by their attempt to preserve their unfair profits they have pushed millions of people to P2P networks.

Of course there are professional pirates, I don’t deny it and they deserve to be punished by law as any other thief but the vast majority of P2P networks users are people like you and me pissed of by music industry greediness. I hope they will one day realize that I’m using P2P networks because of DRM, they have moved me to P2P. I had and I still have no problem to pay for content.

Then comes now the second act. As the DRM has failed, let’s make a law. Here comes the HADOPI

577 deputies talking about something they barely understand for the majority. French assembly debates are looking like comedy shows.

• French Culture minister saying that Internet access is not a fundamental right.
• French government can request you to send your hard drive via mail
• To solve the problem of using P2P from public hotspots, let’s create a white list of site accessible from public hotspots. Don’t we normally call that censorship?
• If you downloaded too much music, they can cut your internet access. What happens when I’m using dial up, will they cut my phone line also?
• Etc, etc…

I’m appalled. HADOPI is just another proof that France is stucked in the past, incapable to see a change in a positive and so unable to take advantage of it (you can also read my post on the french digital revolution).

To the Music industry leader

you should spend your energy to figure out how to recreate your economy is a worldwide interconnected market because this or any law won’t change that. Even, China has difficulties to keep the system closed.

By this law, you will just encourage people to find a better system that P2P to exchange files but it won’t solve your problem.

Funny links (in french):

• Estimate your HADOPI performance
• Fuck HADOPI website