The Goings On in France

First published here.

France will probably not legalize file sharing.

Sorry, but that's the way it is. The headlines screaming about France giving the green light to file sharers have been quite misleading, but there's still some hope to be found.

For those unfamiliar with the French government, there's a lower house called the National Assembly, just like the US Congress, the Australian House of Representatives or the British House of Commons. There's also an upper house called the Senate, just like the US Senate, the Australian Senate or the British House of Lords.

Now, in France (just like everywhere else really), if you're a member of the lower house and don't turn up for work, they just carry on without you. That's what happened in this case: everyone was away for Christmas and a handful of renegades who stayed behind jammed a "pro-p2p" amendment into a bill about intellectual property rights.

The French Culture Minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres has already asked that the debate be re-opened, so the pro-p2p part will probably be taken out before the whole thing goes before the French Senate to sign off on...and the French Senate doesn't have to sign off on it anyway: they can send it back to the National Assembly with a "Get Stuffed!" note stuck on the front, (or more, likely a "Va te faire foutre" note).

So everyone who was about to rush off and find a French proxy service, don't bother.

Yet.

One of the most striking issues of this development is the numbers. Only around 10% of the members of the National Assembly were there for the vote but in total, more than 5% of the people who make the laws in France said file sharing for personal use was a good idea. There may be more, too: 519 of the members of the National Assembly weren't around to vote, but will get a chance to when the vote is opened up again. When the the issue comes up a second time, the people of France will get to see who backs their interests and who sides with the (mainly American) corporations.

One other thing worth noting is the entertainment industry, represented by the likes of Walt Disney, Viacom and News Corp's Fox, say downloading TV shows and movies will cost them $5 billion in revenue this year. The thing here is, it won't cost them five billion bucks.

It won't even cost them five bucks.

It may mean they won't make $5 billion dollars, but that's in no way similar to having $5 billion in the bank and having someone come and take it away from you. This is because you can't lose something you never had in your possession in the first place.

For instance, I didn't hand over my cash to pay for a Britney Spears CD, so the music store didn't lose any money. They just didn't make as much as they might have if I had bought a Britney Spears CD, which I assure you (and them) will never happen.

This is where the entertainment industry seems to get confused and demonstrates its poor understanding of economics: they just expect people will hand over the moolah. Some Hollywood executive wakes up every morning believing that by the end of the day, his company will have sold X million DVDs and X million movie tickets.

Not any more.

The movie studio hasn't actually lost anything tangible, they simply had poor sales forecasts. They still have the movie sitting on a reel of film somewhere too, so it's not as if they can't crank up the projectors in the executive movie theatre and watch the film themselves.

"Someone stole my movie off the internet" is not the same as "someone stole my wallet in the carpark".

I don't know about you, but I feel insulted when I find out someone was really counting on me to buy something and then gets shitty at me when I don't. It's the same feeling I get when a telemarketer phones me up and then calls me an idiot for not jumping at his fantastic deal of a lifetime. The telemarketer should be able to deal with rejection as he's using an active selling technique where I actually have the opportunity to say "Va te faire foutre", but when big media companies simply stick up a bunch of posters, run TV commercials and then complain through the nose about how We The People are "stealing" from them, I get really annoyed.

So as and when the French government removes the "legal file sharing" amendment from the DADVSI bill, don't think of it as a loss to Big Media.

Look at the shitstorm it created and take heart in knowing that governments will soon have to take these issues seriously, just like they had to when the French people rejected the proposed European Constitution in May this year.

Sooner or later, We The People will get what's due to us.

And it will be sweet.