French Government Lobbied to Ban Free Software

[Rui Miguel Silva Seabra]

On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 22:19 +0000, Alex Hudson wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 18:50 +0100, Jerome Dominguez wrote:
> > 25 November 2005. FSF France press release. Friday November 18th,
> > 2005, French Department of Culture. SNEP and SCPP tell Free Software
> > authors: "You shall change your licenses." SACEM add: "You shall stop
> > publishing free software," and warn they are ready "to sue free
> > software authors who will keep on publishing source code" should the
> > "VU/SACEM/BSA/FA Contents Department"[1] bill pass in the Parliament.
> 
> Could someone explain exactly what the problem is here?
> 
> >From reading the article, I get the impression that the bill seeks to
> prevent software accessing media without some form of DRM, which seems a
> step beyond the already bad EUCD situation - is that right?

From what little I understood...

Imagine you use Firefox to download a DRM'ed Windows Media Video file.
Firefox would have to respect the copy prohibition embedded in that .WMV
file, if it doesn't, it would be illegal to use it.

Now imagine Firefox DOES respect the copy prohibition. Since Firefox is
Free Software, it can be modified so it WON'T respect the prohibition.
As such, it would be illegal to use it.

These two situations are an example of what that law would turn illegal.

If you dig to a lower level, maybe the network card driver should
analise the content, I think.

Rui
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