unreasonable to claim that they will be prosecuted. Instead of trying to revert this trend it would be better to tax it. The alternative to this is heavy-handed enforcement and intrusive Digital rights management (DRMs). The global license would provide a steady stream of revenue to authors and artists. Opponents contended that: The global license is a communist measure, while DRMs allow fine-grained, individual, remuneration of artists. There is no reliable method for apportioning the money raised through this method to artists. If polling methods are used, they may miss smaller artists. The global license is contrary to the "test in three steps" that must be verified by every exception to copyright. The global license would fail to provide enough revenue to authors and artists. In the evening sitting of the Assembly on December 21, the first of the series of amendments establishing the global license (identical amendments 153 as proposed by UMP deputy Alain Suguenot and 154 as proposed by deputies from the French Socialist Party) was voted by a 30-to-28 margin, much to the dismay of Culture Minister Donnedieu de Vabres. This was the first time that a legislature anywhere had supported an alternative compensation system to broadly legalize P2P file sharing. The global license proved difficult to handle for the government. It was initially thought that the minister would request another examination of the controversial amendment by the Assembly; however, the head of the UMP group in the assembly, Bernard Accoyer, stated that the French Parliament had demonstrated that it was not a chambre d'enregistrement (a chamber for registering the wishes of the executive) and pointed out that the text was only at the beginning of its examination by Parliament, which has two houses, which seemed to suggest that he expected the amendment to be struck down in the Senate. The examination of the text by the National Assembly resumed in March. The Minister of Culture announced that the government would use its prerogative to withdrawn its own draft law in order to withdraw article 1 of the law, which was the article to which amendments 153/154 applied, and propose in its stead a "1 bis" article. This move was supported by President of the National Assembly Jean-Louis Debré, who exceptionally presided the sitting; Debré cited precedent for such actions to deputies questioning the constitutionality of the action. However, the next day, the government announced that it