While US-based peer-to-peer (P2P) services face the legal wrath of the music industry, the move to legitimacy for file sharing in France is taking a decidedly different tack.

A bill that would help establish a legalized file-sharing system in France is making its way through French Parliament, and the District Court of Paris has ruled in favor of a man accused of illegally uploading and downloading more than 1,000 songs on a P2P network.

The bill and the court ruling stand in stark contrast to the situation in the US, where the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed lawsuits against more than 16,800 individuals for illegal file sharing, with users paying fines to settle the cases in almost every instance.

The music industry has also used the landmark June 2005 US Supreme Court ruling as its basis for cease-and-desist letters it sent to a host of P2P services. As a result, several have shut down and others are weighing the choice of trying to come up with a legal service the industry would support, going out of business, or facing the industry's legal wrath.

The French bill would establish collective licensing for a legalized file-sharing system, streamlining the process for a P2P service to license content from all record labels instead of having to do so individually. The bill, which would require P2P users to pay a voluntary fee of 5 Euros a month to use a P2P service, has been gaining support from local lawmakers, according to a Reuters report.

But while that bill has many hurdles to clear before being passed into law, the French court ruling appears more definitive.

The court ruled that using P2P networks is legal as long as the user is doing so for personal rather than commercial reasons. The court made the ruling in late December but only recently made it public.

The defendant, "Anthony G," was sued by music industry lobby group Société Civile des Producteurs Phonographiques, which accused him of downloading 1,875 copyrighted tracks, mostly from Kazaa, in 2004.

The court determined that the defendant's downloading and uploading qualified as "private copying."

The group said it will appeal the ruling.