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French pirate fined over Rihanna songs

A French man Thursday became the first person to be convicted under a new law aimed at clamping down on film and music piracy when he was fined €150 ($193) for illegally downloading Rihanna songs.

Published: 13 September 2012 15:31 CEST

The Internet piracy enforcement agency Hadopi was mandated by the government in 2009 to send warning letters to ISP subscribers found to be downloading content without authorisation.

The law forces ISPs to hand over personal details of offending IP addresses after sifting through them to hunt out those breaching piracy regulations. Hadopi was authorised to take legal action if a third warning was ignored.

It has so far sued only 14 people since the law came into force in October 2010.

A police court in the northeastern French city of Belfort fined the man for downloading songs of the Bardadian pop star Rihanna despite several warnings. He had risked a €1,500 fine.

The man claimed it was his wife who had downloaded the music, Hadopi said, adding he was fined for "negligence".

French President François Hollande has said he would like to replace Hadopi – an initiative of his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy – with "something else".

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New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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