French Government Lobbied to Ban Free Software

[Alex Hudson]

On Sat, 2005-12-03 at 10:26 +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
> > But, in the EU, overriding DRM is already an offence.
> 
> Yes, breaching copyright is an offense.

That's not what I meant: overriding a DRM technical restriction, even if
there is nothing preventing you from a copyright point of view, is
illegal. You're not allowed to circumvent any technical protection on
something; there is no "fair use" or similar here.

> > my software is already effectively respecting DRM by refusing to
> > access it.
> 
> Most software *doesn't* do what you say -- and *all* of the software
> on a free operating system doesn't.

None of the software on my (free software) system utilises or bypasses
DRM, not even the simple "don't print this" flags on PDF files. I can't
access DRM'd audio or video, either. So, I don't think your statement is
correct.

> What is to become illegal is the distribution of tools that fail to
> betray the user's wishes when media tells them to.

That's already illegal under the EUCD, it's circumvention.

E.g., your example of:

> Distributing or making software that prints whatever the user asks to
> print.

As I said before, evince will not print a PDF that has a no-print flag
set on it. I suspect if it did, it would be a violation of the EUCD.

I know your audio example is also illegal, and I rather suspect that
your example of cp is at least potentially illegal (Alan Cox, for
example, once famously decided not to changelog a fix he made to the
file system security of linux 2.2.20, because a file permissions system
could be used as an access control mechanism, and detailing how to
circumvent that would be a breach of DMCA/EUCD). 

I'm not saying that I'm in favour of these things or anything; just that
I don't understand how the French proposal is worse than what we already
have. Now, MJ Ray has suggested that they may be trying to prevent
people published source code that could be adjusted to circumvent DRM in
the future - that would be an obviously terrible extension of the
already bad EUCD situation. 

Cheers,

Alex.