In what appears to be another own goal the French equivalent of the RIAA Cartel has given its main reason for suing SourceForge an open source file repository.
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/12/french_riaa_vs.htmlLast month the French RIAA, the SPPF, declared that it was bringing suit against SourceForge for aiding and abetting peer-to-peer piracy. It sounded ludicrous, and now there's better evidence to show it is indeed every bit as stupid as it sounded.
For a local perspective on the lawsuit, I was directed to the blog of the "CoPeerRight Agency", which according to its masthead is "the first specialized agency in the protection of royalties and the fight against digital piracy on Peer-to-Peer networks and the Internet" ("1ère agence spécialisée dans la protection des droits d'auteur et la lutte contre la contrefaçon numérique sur les réseaux Peer-to-Peer et Internet"). They seem to be of the general stance that online file sharing is not illegal, or at the very least does not deserve to be countered by suing everyone in sight on shaky legal ground.
Here is my (admittedly shaky) translation; corrections are welcome:
"We would like to return to the astonishing indictment of SourceForge, which does not fail to plunge us into perplexity. The managing director of the SPPF, Jerome Roger, explains the reasoning for this in the following way: "SourceForge is a company which worked on behalf of Shareaza and which we blamed insofar as its engineers carried out the development of the software -- which disappeared today as a P2P program -- Shareaza". But, first of all, the Shareaza software has always been available, up to its most recent version dated October 1, 2008 (version 2.4.0.0)."
If my reading of this is correct, the SPPF is bringing suit against SourceForge not only for the mere act of hosting the Shareaza project, but for actively collaborating with them in its development. This, to me, speaks of an astounding level of ignorance on the part of the SPPF with regard to how software is developed -- either on SourceForge or in general, really.
I dont think I can say it any better than this guy has, they are obviously either very ignorant or are hell-bent on misleading the courts with lies and bluster, something their US counterpart has been very active with in the past.
