Re: France planning to ban free software?? - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Le Samedi 03 Décembre 2005 01:32, Robert Treat a écrit :
> re: http://www.fsffrance.org/news/article2005-11-25.en.html
>
> Francois,
> do you know anything about this? I haven't heard anything about it really
> and to be honest it sounds crazy, but I'd like to get some more details.

I think you're right. It's totaly crazy, a really dumb idea.

It seems that the french music corporation (SACEM, our french RIAA) is having
a hard time dealing with piracy. So, they would like to be able to sue people
giving technical way to download illegally... Someone writing software
without DRM capabilities would be a target. It means every free software
developer.

Here is the file from the french government :
http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/12/dossiers/031206.asp

There's a lot of articles on french web sites :
http://www.eucd.info/138.shtml
http://standblog.org/blog/2005/11/29/93114528-c-est-pas-pour-peter-l-ambiance-mais
http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?2005/11/28/1409-honte-a-la-sacem
http://formats-ouverts.org/blog/2005/09/29/552-les-drm-sont-declares-en-urgence
http://formats-ouverts.org/blog/2005/11/28/629-les-drm-obligatoires
http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/informatique/0,39040745,39290820,00.htm?xtor=1
http://linuxfr.org/2005/11/24/19945.html

There's also some important newspapers writing articles on this but I only
found one on the web :
http://abonnes.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-651865,36-716172@51-698751,0.html
(I think you need to be registered to read this article, so here is an
excerpt :
Cette inflexion de la stratégie des représentants de l'industrie musicale
était attendue. En effet, la Sacem et la SCPP ont récemment dû revoir leur
stratégie en matière de lutte contre le téléchargement de fichiers musicaux.
Le refus de la CNIL de permettre à des sous-traitants de la SCPP de ficher
les internautes contrefacteurs a désamorcé l'idée d'une traque de masse. A
défaut de pouvoir efficacement lutter contre les auteurs de téléchargement
illégaux, c'est sans surprise que les représentants des ayants droit se
retournent contre ceux qui fournissent les moyens techniques de télécharger.
Quid du principe du logiciel libre, celui du partage de la connaissance sans
limitation et des outils qui y mènent ? Est-ce vraiment le problème des
majors  ?
).

There is a petition against it :
http://eucd.info/petitions/index.php?petition=2

French governement will try to vote this law in hurry during Christmas holiday
(22 and 23 december). Of course, there will be less people to vote against
it. I don't understand why they would do such a thing. Our administration is
using a lot of free software. They are using it more and more. Don't they see
where they are going to ?

I hope this can help you to better understand. At least, you'll have more
details with the above links.

Regards.


--
Guillaume.
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