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French RIAA Sues SourceForge For Aiding And Abetting Piracy?

Yes, this sounds every bit as ridiculous to me as it probably does you. The Société civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France, or SPPF -- France's analogue to the RIAA -- is preparing to file suit not only against the makers of various P2P sharing apps, but SourceForge.net, which provides code hosting for many such projects. All together, now, in your best Stupefied Bill Maher Voice: What!?

Let's start with the obvious stuff. SourceForge provides hosting to a staggering variety of open source projects. Yes, some of those are P2P applications like Shareaza, which can be used to obtain copyrighted material illegally. But this is like suing Barnes & Noble for plagiarism, because they put a book on the shelf that just happened to be a ripoff of someone else's work.

Then there is the question of legal jurisdiction, which ought to make for a ripe target of dissection by the folks over at Groklaw. As far as I can tell, the only realistic ramification of suing SourceForge would be to compel them to remove projects of this ilk from their Paris, France-based mirror server, which -- to extend the above analogy -- is like removing the offending book from one Barnes & Noble when there five others within driving distance.

Check out the reactions at the Ubuntu Forums for a good example of the universal level of disgust and dismay this has provoked.

One final note. TorrentFreak.com originally broke the news, although I've scoured for further third-party confirmation of this without too much success. My best source would be Ross Turk of SourceForge itself; I've left him word that I'd like to get some comment from him about this. Stay tuned for a follow-up.

Addendum: Ross has told me: "We do not comment on pending litigation."

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