Panem et circenses
Boy, French luvies annoy me. A lot.
Back in 1994, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was finishing to be renegotiated, giving birth to the World Trade Organisation and its entertaining custom of holding summits in various locations and wrecking destruction on them. The French entertainment industry organised an angry campaign to try and get protection against those trade agreements, and it put lots of singers and actors and so on forward rather than send the Suits to the media. Makes sense. Nothing wrong with protecting your bacon I guess, but instead of being straightforward about it, they crouched it in all those fancy words with Lots of Capital Letters, as if they were trying to save civilisation. The big buzzword then was "l'exception culturelle", meaning to say that "culture" (which in French generally encompasses the entire entertainment industry as well as classical arts and so on) is an exceptionally important area of life which needs to be protected against the normal laws of commerce. French cinema gets a lot of State funding, and radios have to play a set percentage of records sung in French, etc... I found this very surprising at the time, because surely food and health are as important as culture, no? International solidarity this wasn't.
But worse was to come. After a while I realised that a lot of the dimwits shaking with indignation all over the media had barely the faintest idea of what all of this really meant. (I remember the not-so-bright actor Hippolyte Girardot complaining about there being too many blockbuster in the cinema in those words: "when you go to the cinema, it's as if the GATT is already there"! Well yes dear, this would be because it was founded in 1947...) It became clear that many people were interpreting the expression backward, thinking it meant that France as an exceptional culture and so needs to be protected from the barbarians. France is the exception, not culture. This might sound trivial, but I am pretty sure that this is where France started becoming really chauvinistic again, as evidenced with the late 90s football victories. No one under 60 when I lived there would have been caught dead waving a tricolor flag. Suddenly the right-on brigade started sounding very petty and nationalistic. The misunderstanding spread, and soon people were talking about "the French exception" instead of "the cultural exception" without ever pausing to ask what it meant. In 2001, the boss of ill-fated media conglomerate Vivendi Universal, Jean-Marie Messier, caused an outrage when he announced that "the French exception was dead". The whole mess was debated over and over again without anyone pausing to reflect that the blasted thing had died before being properly born. Everyone rallied around the undefined concept. Only in France.
Fast forward to this year. France is at last embracing the digital age, broadband is booming, and with it Illegal Downloading a.k.a. PIRACY! The Minister of Culture, duly briefed by the lobbies, sent a law to parliament outloading all this under severe punishment. In a surprise twist, parliament rejected this yesterday and went completely the other way, effectively legalising peer-to-peer transfers of copyrighted material provided a subscription is paid, which then goes towards royalties. Whose royalties, you may well ask? There is no P-to-P chart. Well that is easy to guess because there is already a similar arrangement in place thanks to the entertainment industry's effective lobbying a few years ago, with regards to recordable material such as CD-Rs and CR-RWs and the royalties are paid pro rata of sales of records. That is right. If you are an artist based in France and you buy CD-Rs to burn your work on, say, you effectively have to pay Céline Dion and Johnny Halliday for the privilege! It's the music and film equivalent of the Common Agricultural Policy, where unearned money goes straight to the fat cats. Well the industry is now extremely cross, and the usual right-on brigade was yelling in outrage all over the media today about legalised theft! Hearing all the champagne Guevaras turning into angry shopkeepers and complaining of parliamentary demagogy is a rare treat, but it all the above clicked for me when I heard left-wing film-maker Pierre Jolivet ranting that hell, food is more important than music and films, so then why doesn't parliament say people have the right to order food on the Internet whether they can afford it or not? Ha. You didn't say anything when they came for the farmers, etc...
Back in 1994, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was finishing to be renegotiated, giving birth to the World Trade Organisation and its entertaining custom of holding summits in various locations and wrecking destruction on them. The French entertainment industry organised an angry campaign to try and get protection against those trade agreements, and it put lots of singers and actors and so on forward rather than send the Suits to the media. Makes sense. Nothing wrong with protecting your bacon I guess, but instead of being straightforward about it, they crouched it in all those fancy words with Lots of Capital Letters, as if they were trying to save civilisation. The big buzzword then was "l'exception culturelle", meaning to say that "culture" (which in French generally encompasses the entire entertainment industry as well as classical arts and so on) is an exceptionally important area of life which needs to be protected against the normal laws of commerce. French cinema gets a lot of State funding, and radios have to play a set percentage of records sung in French, etc... I found this very surprising at the time, because surely food and health are as important as culture, no? International solidarity this wasn't.
But worse was to come. After a while I realised that a lot of the dimwits shaking with indignation all over the media had barely the faintest idea of what all of this really meant. (I remember the not-so-bright actor Hippolyte Girardot complaining about there being too many blockbuster in the cinema in those words: "when you go to the cinema, it's as if the GATT is already there"! Well yes dear, this would be because it was founded in 1947...) It became clear that many people were interpreting the expression backward, thinking it meant that France as an exceptional culture and so needs to be protected from the barbarians. France is the exception, not culture. This might sound trivial, but I am pretty sure that this is where France started becoming really chauvinistic again, as evidenced with the late 90s football victories. No one under 60 when I lived there would have been caught dead waving a tricolor flag. Suddenly the right-on brigade started sounding very petty and nationalistic. The misunderstanding spread, and soon people were talking about "the French exception" instead of "the cultural exception" without ever pausing to ask what it meant. In 2001, the boss of ill-fated media conglomerate Vivendi Universal, Jean-Marie Messier, caused an outrage when he announced that "the French exception was dead". The whole mess was debated over and over again without anyone pausing to reflect that the blasted thing had died before being properly born. Everyone rallied around the undefined concept. Only in France.
Fast forward to this year. France is at last embracing the digital age, broadband is booming, and with it Illegal Downloading a.k.a. PIRACY! The Minister of Culture, duly briefed by the lobbies, sent a law to parliament outloading all this under severe punishment. In a surprise twist, parliament rejected this yesterday and went completely the other way, effectively legalising peer-to-peer transfers of copyrighted material provided a subscription is paid, which then goes towards royalties. Whose royalties, you may well ask? There is no P-to-P chart. Well that is easy to guess because there is already a similar arrangement in place thanks to the entertainment industry's effective lobbying a few years ago, with regards to recordable material such as CD-Rs and CR-RWs and the royalties are paid pro rata of sales of records. That is right. If you are an artist based in France and you buy CD-Rs to burn your work on, say, you effectively have to pay Céline Dion and Johnny Halliday for the privilege! It's the music and film equivalent of the Common Agricultural Policy, where unearned money goes straight to the fat cats. Well the industry is now extremely cross, and the usual right-on brigade was yelling in outrage all over the media today about legalised theft! Hearing all the champagne Guevaras turning into angry shopkeepers and complaining of parliamentary demagogy is a rare treat, but it all the above clicked for me when I heard left-wing film-maker Pierre Jolivet ranting that hell, food is more important than music and films, so then why doesn't parliament say people have the right to order food on the Internet whether they can afford it or not? Ha. You didn't say anything when they came for the farmers, etc...