Charbax.com

Bush-friendly extreme right french president Sarkozy wants to disconnect people from the Internet, put people on a national database and not allow them to sign up for another ISP, then fine users up to 3 million euros and put them in jail even. This is so ridiculously funny ridiculous, putting the kids and other young people in jail, fine them, ban them from using the Internet just because they are not accepting to pay intermediaries like Fnac for a service that is absolutely useless to both artists and consumers.

What is funny is that the guy who wrote this law is the CEO of Fnac, which is the biggest retail store chain in France for CDs and DVDs. Such distributor is totally useless in this digital age, where artists should be able to sell their music directly to the consumers with no intermediaries in between taking the biggest part of the transaction.

What will happen is that the french will Boycott participating CD and DVD retailers such as Fnac, boycott the major music and movie studios for wanting to keep control on the cultural industries at all cost. The french people will pirate more if such a law is enacted, cause secured encrypted p2p networks will florish, to keep the music and film majors from sniffing users IP addresses which ISPs are obligated to provide in this law (even the progressive Free Iliad was forced by the Culture minister to comply with this law in exchange of getting the last 3G telecommunications licence). Sniffing users IP addresses is something that the music and movie studios can do with open eMule and BitTorrent p2p networks. But the french will just be able to add a layer of encryption and proxies to the eMule and BitTorrent p2p networks, and thus they will have an unstoppable, untrackable p2p network.

The established music, movie and distribution majors are just interested to keep their control on the cultural industry income for as long as they can. They are probably hoping that they can stay in control of those billions of euros for another few years. The cultural development is loosing out during this unreasonable process and so are artists and the people.

I contributed to Ségolène Royal’s campaign by video-blogging at http://sego.tv and having done what I could so that she had DivX DVD quality video streaming, Miro BitTorrent RSS integration on her official campaign website at http://videos.desirsdavenir.org (my videos are under “Votez Danois!”):