P2P (More) Legal in France

Found on Slashdot on Thursday, 10 March 2005
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A french appeal court ruled yesterday in favour of somebody who downloaded about 500 movies, on the ground that those were private copies, and that he didn't redistributed them, and that a tax was payed on blank media. This sets the huge precedent that P2P is legal over there. For the details, apparently no distinction was made on the method used to download the movies (upload issues) and the famous EUCD directive was even used by the defending lawyer.

I bet the movie industry is grinding their teeth now. Kind of surprising to see that this happened in France, who recently decided that posting exploits is illegal. But whatever, it's good to see that P2P isn't guilty by default.