French President Jacques Chirac has added his opinions to the somewhat confusing debate on illegal file sharing that has been doing the rounds in French political circles in the last few weeks. At the end of last year in bizarre sequence of events a government drafted bill that proposed tougher punishments for people who illegally share music online was amended by the country's parliament so that P2P file sharing would become legal.
The amendments came from politicians who want France to adopt a system whereby the sharing of music online becomes legal, but with internet service providers forced to pass on a standard levy per user to the content owners as a blanket royalty for any files shared by their customers. Basically it's an online version of the levy that exists in some countries on blank CDs and cassettes, paid to the music industry as a royalty for the duplicate copies of albums customers inevitably make at home. While adopting this principle to the digital domain has been discussed many times before, it hasn't been adopted anywhere as yet. The proposal is not popular with the content owners, but if it were to become law in France it would gain more legitimacy as a possible system elsewhere.
But chances are it won't actually become French law, given that the country's government opposes the move, and is backed by numerous French media and entertainment companies, including the massive Vivendi Universal.
Commenting on the ongoing debate last week, Chirac himself was a bit vague, simply saying that the rights of both content owners and internet users needed to be balanced. Reuters quote the President as saying: "It's with creative people that we will win in the battle over content. We should guarantee their rights and their fair payment, by finding a balance between the fight against piracy and user freedom".