Mail sent to the CULT members:
Amendments to the CULT report about Cultural Industries are supporting criminalization of file sharing, termination of subscribers’ contracts, network filtering, and propaganda campaigns targeting youngsters.
The criminalization of file sharing is unrealistic, unfair and goes against historical direction. Instead of requiring a mass repression that is the best way to lose customers, the cultural industries should try to adapt and find realistic models.
While restricting more and more rights of the public, cultural industries are destroying themselves copyright: copyright can not exist without the public rights. Elected officials in charge of culture should all realize that culture is much more than the defense of the economic interests of cultural industries.
The culture can only exist if the public can access it. The public rights must now be respected: the right to read contents on any player, the right to private copy, the right of respect for private life. DRM technologies, that violate these rights, should be banned. European policy must be consistent: how to prohibit private copy in one hand and require “private copy” taxes on more and more supports: CD, DVD, hard drives, and soon in France: game consoles and mobile phones.
Termination of subscribers’ contracts and network filtering have been imposed in France by the Olivennes mission: There is a clear conflict of interest, since Denis Olivennes is the CEO of fnac.com, the largest french site selling cd and dvd. Acting like this, FNAC simply protects its economic interests, without taking into account the public interest. Making laws only by taking into account the industrial interests, without understanding that other ways, more balanced, are possible can only lead to a dead end, and increasingly widening the gap that has begun to separate the culture industries and public relationship.
A purely economic vision of culture is not acceptable, neither a purely economic vision of European construction: the failure of french referendum on the European constitutional treaty should have made an understanding of that.
Imposing this vision to schools is totally unacceptable: such campaigns targeting children began years ago, and have been rejected by the public, particularly in France. The speech of culture industries lobbies should not be relayed by schools. The debate about copyright is a complex political debate, in which many opposants have different point of view: who could have the right to present a vision rather than another to young people? Historically, the desire to carry out these campaigns date of the policy decided together, a decade ago, by the lobbies of culture industries and the Clinton administration: Europe is not obliged to bend over this “hollywood” policy.
For all these reasons,the following amendments have to be rejected: 69,70,72,75,78,79,80,81,83,88.
Sources:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2004_2009/documents/pr/684/684266/684266en.pdf
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2004_2009/documents/am/696/696239/696239en.pdf