A little late but this is really interesting…
So this article on zero paid: http://www.zeropaid.com/news/87426/french-pres-party-caught-infringing-copyright-once-again/ documents the copyright violations of the French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP). This includes, buying only 50 DVDs and deciding to make about 350 more but edit out the producer, Galaxie Press’s logo and add their own. Basically, the UMP was pirating and not the online sharing with your best friends kind, but the actually copying and distributing of hard goods kind of pirating.
They also have the usual public performance issues by using music that they have either not gotten the copyright for or, were denied the copyright when they asked and the songs ended up as background music for their ads anyway.
Obviously there is not an international judiciary who would try the French government for their mass copyright violations (they settled with all whom rights they infringed), but with the news that Google Books was found in violation French copyright law by digitally copying French copyrighted books, thus French books are not going to be included in the massive Google Book project, it would get interesting if the “clean hands” precedent could be used against the French Government, who has knowingly violated copyright law, but alas no. The UMP on one hand can freely and repeatedly make copyright “mistakes,” but they have a separate, stringent copyright system for everyone else. So, I guess my question is how do we govern governments who violate copyright? Could you imagine a pirating Monarch being told they no longer have internet access? It just seems like a blatant power differential between the government and the people that has yet to be addressed.
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