French Constitutional Tribunal overturns Sarkozy's "cyber-pirate" law

international | crime and justice | other press

Wednesday June 10, 2009 20:04

by iosaf

The constitutional council of the republic of France has today published its 580th ruling this year. It overturns a Sarkozy law which would have allowed for the state to block internet access by all the kind of people who download movies, books, music and all that sort of general crap & fun regardless of whether they intented to enjoy it at home or sit by the side of a street like a third worlder and flog it to a passerby.

This good news shall have repercussions on the European political level, the history of Human Rights, the shaping of the entertainment industry lobby strategy to tax RW CD' and storage devices & thus will make many more pages of news than malaria or Darfur.

If you are old enough to remember using a magnetic tape with or without noise reduction to tape your favourite songs off the wireless or are perhaps of a younger generation who built a huge collection of VHS or Betamax recordings of movies off of telly - you might have missed how the modern entertainment industry wants to extend property rights beyond its own civil case options to persuading states such as France (or Sweden) to do the enforcing for them. & all of this just before they make sure you can only watch a digital telly.

The ruling may be read by anyone whose French comprehension level is equivalent to Higher Level Leaving Certificate. I suppose you could go and cheat and try using google to translate it for you, but you'd get a garbled version. You have to put the work in - is my motto.

The ruling need not be read nevertheless to appreciate its core jurisprudence :- that only a case by case judgement and sucessful prosecution could empower a judge to pass an order to stop a citizen using the internet . Anything else would constitute a breach of citizen's Human Rights.

Which just goes to show what we have to worry about in the west these days, where as we know a pandemic creeps forward unrelentlessly yet nobody is really dying. Thank God third world poor people don't have the internet and can't afford batteries to burn top of the pop anthems off their clockwork radios.

The judgement in its complete version to overturn the cyberpiracy laws of May 19th 2009
http://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/conseil-constitut....html

I suppose this will make news in the tech press before the law press. Not that anyone reads the law press (perhaps on account of it being published in leather bound editions which you need big shelves to store).