France mulls overhaul of digital copyright bill

**Jared Moya** · January 16th, 2006, 02:48 PM

The AFP report said the government's culture ministry issued a statement saying the bill was being amended on the orders of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to notably enshrine the right of consumers to make private copies of music and film disks.

It would also make a distinction between people illegally downloading for profit and the estimated eight million individuals in France who occasionally add to their music and movie collections via Internet peer-to-peer sites, the report said.

The AFP report also said the changes follow the French government's decision to withdraw its original bill from parliament when a small group of MPs from the ruling party and opposition benches managed, in a middle-of-the-night vote, to legalize peer-to-peer file-sharing in December.

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