Music - Credit: rossinabossio on Flickr (CC BY)
TorrentFreak reports that French record labels have decided to sue file sharing applications LimeWire, Vuze, Morpheus, and Shareaza. They are also suing Shareaza’s hosting provider, SourceForge.
SPFF had already sued the various companies and organizations last year, but until now it has been unclear whether the US based companies behind the applications could be prosecuted under French law. A French court has now ruled that this is indeed possible, which means that they can proceed to court.
Recent French legislation which inspired the labels to go after the P2P companies, suggests that all P2P applications must have a feature to block the transfer of unauthorized copyright works. The clients that are sued by SPFF obviously don’t have such a feature. In fact, it is questionable whether it would be technically possible to develop such a filter. Nevertheless, SPFF demands it, and is claiming millions of dollars in damages for lost revenue.
Interestingly, SPFF is also going after Sourceforge, the open source development website, because it hosts the P2P application Shareaza. Putting aside the discussion on the responsibilities of application developers for their users activities, the decision to go after SourceForge for hosting a application that can potentially infringe, is stretching credibility beyond all bounds”
Not exactly sure what the French labels are expecting out of this, since I don’t believe that French law applies to software hosted in the United States, even with the ruling by the French court. Also, isn’t Vuze hosted at SourceForge as well?