[RockdaMan]

Wow!

Under the new scheme, it is publishers who will set a single price for their e-books, which distributors must follow. So long as the publisher is French, distributors must abide by the list price even if based elsewhere.

The point of such laws is to keep prices up in order to fund French culture and insulate it from the ruthlessness of the market.

French Culture Minister Mitterand said that "the book remains a unique cultural artifact, irreducible to a solely commercial dimension… Thirty years after the Lang Law on book prices, here is founding legislation for the book trade and the regulation of cultural industries in the digital age."

And he expressed his firm belief that "the editor should to be able to control the value of the book, regardless of the location of the distributer. I am therefore delighted that the balance struck by the joint committee allows distributors in France of playing on equal footing with those outside our borders."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...1#comments-bar