French Government Lobbied to Ban Free Software

[Alex Hudson]

On Sat, 2005-12-03 at 02:34 +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
> You're not being stupid, but you're victim to a confusion the media
> consortium would love to propagate.
> 
> The "respect the copy prohibition" refers to a *legal* restriction,
> not a technical one. That is, a device or program that "respects" such
> a prohibition would be obeying the law (and ignoring the user), rather
> than being technically restricted by the medium.

hm, I think my point was slightly more subtle than this.

You're right, DRM restrictions are not equivalent to legal restrictions.
But, in the EU, overriding DRM is already an offence. What I'm asking is
how forcing software to respect DRM results in less freedom - my
software is already effectively respecting DRM by refusing to access it.

In other words, I'm asking for an example scenario of something that
would be legal under the EUCD, but not legal under this new law, so that
I can properly understand the concern here.

Cheers,

Alex