France: The SPPF Sues Morpheus, Azureus and Shareaza

The follow is a translation of an article from the French website Ratiatum that deserves to be read by the English-speaking among us.

In a ridiculous and grotesque judicial move, made possible by the DADVSI law passed by the UMP government and, above all, by the Vivendi amendment supported by Nicolas Sarkozy, the SPPF, which represents independent labels in France, is suing three P2P software vendors.

And so it begins! The Vivendi amendment, hotly contested when it was debated in parliament and passed by a whisker by the Joint Committee of the National Assembly and the Senate, has been put to the test by French music labels. They have filed suit against three software vendors: Morpheus, Azureus and Shareaza. It has to be said that they would have been wrong not to take advantage of this gift given to them by the De Villepin government and Donnedieu de Vabres, a government minister, a gift that was carefully wrapped, so to speak, by then Minister of the Interior and UMP president Nicolas Sarkozy.

The amendment, requested by the eponymous French conglomerate, punishes by three years in prison and a fine of 300,000 euros the publishing of “software manifestly designed for illicit use.” Never mind its lack of precision and the insecurity that it subjects software vendors to. Its application in civil law forces publishers of file-sharing software to put in place measures to prevent the downloading of illicit content. It is on this basis that the Société des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (Society of Phonogram Producers in France) filed suit against three software vendors. They hope to win the right to have the case judged in France and are asking for 20.3 million euros in damages and interest.

The choice of the three applications being targeted is interesting:

• Morpheus is a sitting duck that it is just too easy to take pot shots at. Already found guilty in the United States, it is itself seeking 4 billion dollars from eBay but no longer boasts a single user.
• Azureus is one of the rare open source programs to have dared to dip its toe in the waters of commerce by providing content publishers with a source of revenues. The publisher of the BitTorrent client has created a VOD platform, Zudeo (now Vuze), in the United States.
• Shareaza is an open source multi-platform application that has never had commercial ambitions, has never displayed any advertising and has therefore never earned a single euro of revenue. It is essentially the work of a lone developer. Even today, no ads can be seen on the official website nor in the software itself. It is nonetheless one of the most popular clients for downloading legal content from the Ratiatum download channel.

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3 Comments »

1. Hi Matt,

   Thanks for the translation, good work! I wish you guys will stay out of focus for a long, long time… may it be forever.

   Cheers,
   Guillaume

   Comment by Guillaume Champeau — 6/12/2007 @ 7:34 pm

2. Ah ! Living in France is sometimes not so easy …

   Comment by benoitb — 6/13/2007 @ 8:20 am

3. Shareaza is not multi-platform and hasn’t been the work of a lone developer since version 2.0.

   Comment by kevogod — 6/14/2007 @ 6:36 am

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