With the aim to sue P2P users, the majors, staunch defenders of the fight against the online piracy, are using surveillance tactics to capture or to commit piracy of Internet users’ personal data[1]. In this chance the majors lost the battle. The French Court has decided that the music companies and other copyright owners must abstain to monitor people who download music through the Internet.

France has a high standard personal data protection law, this instrument judge –those tactics- against the law. A privacy violation fine can reach 300,000 or 350,000 euros and five years imprisonment. Some reflections:

  • Before the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) become a part of our daily life and the digitalization phenomenon spread everywhere, there was not a direct relation between data protection and copyright. People just buy a book or record, read it, skim it, listen to the music once and again, all of that in an anonymous way.
  • Twenty years ago both rights were not in constant collision. However, nowadays, with the development of the ICT and, in this particular case, with the anti-piracy campaigns against those who download music through the Internet, the collision between both rights grows exponentially.
  • The majors require personal data of the Internet users to file suits against the presumptive responsibles. For that, they monitor the activities and customs of the Internet users without a judicial order or an authorization of the Data Protection Authority.
  • In France, the Court has decided that the music companies and other copyright owners cannot conduct freely monitoring operations to identify the Internet users who violate the copyright laws.
  • The fundamental right to the data protection recognizes to the citizen the capacity to control his/her personal data and the faculty to dispose and decide on them. Every person has the right to know why and how his/her data are treated.
  • Because we live in societies more and more influenced by informatics, interconnected, filled by indexes and databases, it has been constructed (principally in the European Union) a set of legal principals of gradual acceptation mainly in Latin America, that step by step are being implemented through laws.
  • Peru, Paraguay and Colombia have promulgated sectorial laws or have implemented Constitutional Court (supreme interpreter of the Constitution) decisions. Also Colombia and Peru have a comprehensive bill on personal data protection.
  • However, up to now, only Argentina has a law that meets the protection standards established by the European Union.
  • On the political level, the Chiefs of State and Government of Portugal, Spain and the Latin American countries included Peru, Colombia and Ecuador in their XIII Meeting in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia on November 2003 clearly recognized the importance of the Fundamental Right to the Personal Data Protection, when they stated in the point 45 of the final declaration that:

“…we are conscious that the personal data protection is a fundamental right and we recognize the importance of the regulatory initiatives, in our countries, to protect the privacy of the citizens included in the Antigua Declaration in which the Red Iberoamericana de Proteccion de Datos was created, open to all the countries of our Community.”

  • The United States does not consider personal data protection as a fundamental right. Its politics usually consider personal data as merchandise subject to a free market. We hope that the FTA influence and other commercial spaces like the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) do not have a negative influence in our personal data and privacy protection culture.

Fuente: French court favors personal privacy over piracy searches

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