French Government Lobbied to Ban Free Software

[MJ Ray]

Alex Hudson <home at alexhudson.com>
> 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.

Some DRMs aren't effective if simply ignored.  I can see why
DRMers would like those simple "read-only flag" measures to
have heavy legal penalties, because they're very cheap to make.

The amendment 2nd part seems to criminalise failure to add
Digital Restriction Measures when told that the software you
publish or distribute is being used to help break DRMs. I don't
remember that in EUCD. I thought EUCD forbids one telling others
how to break DRMs, and publishing software specifically to break
DRMs: did it also criminalise programmers who merely ignored DRMs?

This may be a problem for programs which can be hacked to ignore
some DRM flags in files.  It looks like merely giving the source
code to program X could be a counterfeiting crime if that law
passes and the DRMers make a public statement "program X
does not respect our DRMs".

Hope that helps,
-- 
MJ Ray - personal email, see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
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