Dear all,

The Zelnik committee on the Creation and the Internetrnet (in charge of makin proposals for enriching legal offers of contents on the Internet" and "finding new funding sources for creation") has delivered its report yesterday :
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/mcc/Espace-Presse/Dossiers-de-presse/Rapport-Creation-et-Internet

Our ubiquitous president will make it the core subject in his best wishes to the Culture world at 6 pm today.

For French readers 2 analysis :
- The Quadrature du net press release
http://www.laquadrature.net/fr/mission-zelnik-deni-des-droits-et-business-aux-frais-du-contribuable
- A post on my blog
http://paigrain.debatpublic.net/?p=1442

Main points of notice :
- Much ado about nothing : a collection of complex measures to obtain and spend a few tens of millions of euros.
- Subsidies to unfair trade : one million voucher cards for download from offers labelled as legal (half paid by the government and half by the card holder) will be issued. Wonderful :Which business does not want it. All the more remarkable since it subsidies businesses that are inequitable to both users and creators.
- Charging for the public domain : this is an old song in france. We great denunciators of merchandization hate so much the non-market sphere that we are ready to tax it. here the idea is that since the public money is not able to fund the digitization of film archives, the use of public domain audiovisual material would be taxed to fund it.
- But there are also some good news : the Zelnik committee proposes compulsory rights management for commercial streaming and making available for download (without rights to share). This is if the players do not agree on extended collective licenses by end of 2010 and only for 3 years after. It will be a true disaster : it is a major and huge gift to ISPs and Google to give them an overall access to all catalogs (at a cost that only them can afford) without the counterweight for diversity of P2P sharing. The little taxes that are proposed (on ad income for Google , probably impossible to implement, and on reduced reduced VAT for ISPs) will be peanuts in comparison of this gift. Forget about small commercial offers. BUT, it is a great precedent for both extended collective licenses and compulsory rights management if the president takes it on board.

Happy new year,
--
Philippe Aigrain
Founder and CEO, Sopinspace, Society for Public Information Spaces