The French government's attempt to rush a bill on copyright in the digital age into law is running into trouble.
The bill, "Authors' rights and related rights in an information society," is intended to transpose a European Union directive on copyright into national legislation. It was the subject of a late-night debate in the National Assembly on Wednesday, as part of a fast-track process that allows the government to dispense with the usual third and fourth readings by senators and deputies.
The government says the fast-track treatment is necessary because France faces massive fines from the European Commission if it does not transpose the directive into French law. The law should have been passed by Dec. 22, 2002.
Critics of the bill say the government is using the fast-track procedure to sneak in additional provisions, not required by the European Commission.
The incessant lobbying by the content industry has led to a bill and amendments that threaten liberties even more than the directive, according to the Ligue Odebi, a coalition of broadband users.
The trouble, for the government, is that it doesn't want the bill to become law in the form currently debated by the National Assembly. Around midnight Wednesday, opposition deputies succeeded in amending the bill so it explicitly allows the use of peer-to-peer file-sharing software to download copies of copyrighted music, although the uploading of such files would remain illegal.
The government is now calling for another vote, in order to remove the amendment.
Odebi welcomed the bill's amendment, which it described as "the first aiming to give a legal framework to the noncommercial exchange of cultural works on the Internet."
The proposal to allow online copying of music has parallels in existing French law governing distribution of music on physical media. French consumers have the right to make a small number of copies of music recordings for personal use. In return, they pay a levy on blank audio and video cassettes, recordable CDs and DVDs, and even on flash memory and hard disk drives if they are incorporated into a digital music player. This levy is divided up between artists, composers and distributors of music to compensate them for the lost sales.
However, any attempt to introduce a similar levy on Internet access must be handled carefully, and the levy should not be universal, as this could exclude the poor from the Internet, Odebi said. Instead, any such levy should only be paid by those who upload files, the group proposed.
The government is continuing to push the bill through: the debate on it was scheduled to continue late this afternoon, and perhaps into the night.
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