Asinine lawsuit from French music interests targets Sourceforge

by Lee Mathews Nov 15th 2008

Torrent Freak reported yesterday that the SPFF -- think of it as the French RIAA -- filed lawsuits against the developers of P2P clients Vuze, Limewire, and Morpheus. There is also a fourth target, and I'll get to that particular bit of insanity later.

The SPFF's beef is with the fact that these programs don't provide a system to block copyright protected materials from being shared. Because the programs don't prevent files from being shared, the SPFF argues that the programs are complicit in the act itself.

It's the same flawed P2P argument that agencies have been making for the last decade. This "making available" argument has failed to hold up in US court cases against individual users.

To claim that the developers of these programs are responsible for what their users decide to do with it is pure idiocy. If someone were to author a subversive plot to overthrow the French government using OpenOffice Writer, would there be a lawsuit filed against Sun? OK, don't answer that...

The kicker: Rather than actually going after those who develop the fourth app (Shareaza), the SPFF decided to sue SourceForge - who merely provide hosting for Shareaza's project files. SourceForge has absolutely nothing to do with the actual development of the program.

When I read this, I started having visions of the SPFF headquarters looking like something out of Bizarro World from the old Superfriends cartoon. Clearly the only people that could hatch a scheme like this would be badly animated super villains.

I'm sure there's no possible way this fiasco could backfire on the French music industry. After all, I think we can all agree that the P2P community is usually very good about knuckling under to threats from coporate interests.

In an unrelated note, I have to check uTorrent to see if my downloads are finished.

Tags: bitt, lawsuit, p2p, riaa, sourceforge

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

hazard said 5:51PM on 11-15-2008

Try telling that to the owners of Kazaa who were successfully sued by ARIA for allowing users to illegally to swap copyrighted songs. Making an application open source allows the program to live on even if it's original developer(s) can't touch it, hence the action against Sourceforge.

It may seem pretty flawed to you [Lee] and me but we have obvious bias which a Judge won't show and will make a decision based on the facts presented to them.

Matias Korhonen said 9:16PM on 11-15-2008

Though it really is a shame that uTorrent isn't open source, and that there is no port for Linux.

Ryoscorn said 7:52PM on 11-16-2008

I hear that utorrent works fairly well under wine

Matias Korhonen said 7:58PM on 11-16-2008

Have you used wine? It's ugly as hell (Ugh, that Windows look) and I wouldn't trust it too much. I do run Picasa on wine (the only way you can, I wish Google would do a proper port...) but otherwise I try and avoid it.

For now I'll try and make do with Deluge or Transmission, but Transmission has no RSS support and the RSS plugin in Deluge is dodgy.

And before anybody suggests Azureus/Vuze, I don't want anything that bloated (and it's built on Java, another technology I try and avoid)...

Hel said 11:30AM on 11-17-2008

Second for transmission. Ships with Ubuntu 8.04 and after by default, and actually works pretty well. I personally use Azureus (Vuze???) now cause I like all the pretty.

Glenn Tobey said 10:00PM on 11-15-2008

Did source forge change their DL of the month because it's kind of funny that shareaza is the Download of the month

iampriteshdesai said 1:21AM on 11-16-2008

This article was very cool!

Niall said 3:35AM on 11-16-2008

I think its a shame that they would even consider sue somewhere like sourceforge, fair enough threaten them so they remove such applications. I am very pro open source so I think an attack on sourceforge is stupid. When looking for software the first place I go is sourceforge and if I cant find it there I use Google.

I do apologise if i have misunderstood this or got some of my facts wrong.

Gustav said 4:06AM on 11-16-2008

I think that they are probably testing a new [dumb but real] French law criminalising P2P software [as facilitating IP and copright infringement]. What they are probably seeking [and thus SourceForge *is* a logical starting point] is to get French IP addresses blocked

PS_4 said 4:08AM on 11-16-2008

Hillarious. Why not just sue the inventors of the internet while they're at it. Idiots.

markyb said 4:17PM on 11-16-2008

Thats easy, just sue Al Gore.

PADH said 7:45AM on 11-17-2008

Well, the new ill conceived French law and that lawsuit are utterly stupid since, in France and Belgium, you often can find a public media-library near you, where everyone is entitled to borrow CD’s for a few days and copy them for personal use. The only drawback is that, in Belgium at least, you have to wait about 6 months after the release date, to see the Medias in the shelves.
The truth is that French music has been less and less creative, more and more commercial and all in all uninteresting since the mainstream Medias started to sell songs as they sell soap and it slowly got to the point they are trying to sell video commercials music through radio ads.
The best French groups and singers are often known for their live concerts, and make money through that. One CD title is now sometimes regarded as deluxe concert flyers (sort of).

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