Ars Technica reports that Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim, an employee of the French broadcast station TF1, was fired after his employer found that he had written to his MP (Member of Parliament) voicing opposition to the French “3-strikes” law. The termination was said to be because of “strategic differences” with TF1.

The bill is sometimes referred to as “HADOPI,” after the French acronym for the new administrative authority that the bill would create; HADOPI would be responsible for overseeing warnings and Internet disconnections for those who repeatedly infringe online copyrights. The idea is so unpopular that 88 percent of the European Parliament this week voted to ban the practice unless overseen by a judge.

After Bourreau-Guggenheim expressed his opposition to the law, he thought no more about it until he was called into his boss’ office and shown… an exact copy of his e-mail to Panafieu. According to his boss, the e-mail had been provided by the Ministry of Culture, where Minister Christine Albanel is the French government’s key backer of the Création et Internet law (and also a UMP member).

But why did the Ministry of Culture have Bourreau-Guggenheim’s e-mail? Because Panafieu’s office had passed the message from its constituent on to the Ministry, which then passed it to TF1, which also supports the new bill.

I don’t know how things work in France, but it sounds like that could be considered political discrimination. I would hardly call a private e-mail message to an MP a “strategic difference,” and the fact that he did not quit suggests that he probably still supports the company in some way. It isn’t like he was publicly campaigning against his employer and everything they stand for, or even criticizing the company at all.

• Ars Technica
• Digg

Chemoluminescence - Credit: everyone's idle on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

The BBC plans to release R&DTV under CC BY-NC v2.

The BBC announced the move on Thursday through its Backstage Blog. For now, the experiment is extremely limited. A single program, called R&D TV, will be released for download to anyone, regardless of whether they’re located in the UK or not. So far, only one episode is done, and a second is in the works; more may be made if these prove to be reasonably popular.

Episode one can be downloaded from a BBC FTP server, where Flash, Quicktime, and Ogg versions are available, either as a five minute series of excerpts or in its full, half hour glory. The blog post suggests that Windows Media versions should be made available as well but, so far, these have not materialized. The files will also be made available through YouTube and Blip.TV.

As usual, while this is a step in the right direction, I need to mention that I really wish they were using a free license, like CC BY-SA.  I wish NC would just die.  Has anyone figured out what it means yet?  One thing that’s really weird is that they are using version 2.  What’s wrong with version 3?  Oh, also good job on offering Ogg.

• Ars Technica
• BBC Backstage

”The internet is a series of tubes.” Source: Eirik Solheim on NKRbeta. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Norway.

The Norwegian Broadcasting Company is setting their own BitTorrent tracker to host their television shows, as direct downloads proved to be too bandwidth intensive.

After some very successful tests through 2008 the Norwegian state broadcaster has decided to set up their own BitTorrent tracker and start offering content through this form of distribution on a more regular basis.

The tracker is based on the same OpenTracker software that the Pirate Bay has been using for the last couple of years. But it will only be used to distribute content from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK).

NRK is license funded and aims to reach their audience with the best possible quality. Tests with traditional download methods have proven difficult because of the large files and extreme load on the servers.

The first show we’re putting on our new tracker is a very popular television series about people living in remote places in Norway. It features fascinating people and spectacular scenery. We have provided all the Norwegian subtitle files and if people want to fansub any of the episodes we’re more than happy to let you do that. Please let us know in the comments and we’ll link to your translations.

It’s great to see a television network not only embrace the Internet and BitTorrent instead of fighting it, but openly allow for fansubs as well. Many translations have already been made according to the Web page. Hopefully more networks will follow.

PS: This is a giant backlog of stories that did not get posted while I was away. As such they are not in chronological order with the rest of the site and are quite old.

• NRKbeta
• Slashdot