French Government Lobbied to Ban Free Software

[Alex Hudson]

On Fri, 2005-12-02 at 16:27 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> 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?

Well, here's the thing - when I said "ignored", I generally mean "can't
access" rather than "software bypasses the 'do not view' flag". As an
example, I have a lovely PDF viewer in Gnome which allows me to
cut'n'paste text out of PDFs, which is nifty. However, it does respect
the awful PDF "don't print this", "don't save this" rubbish (as well as
the slightly more respectable "don't view this" rc4 encryption, which it
could hardly ignore).

Now, if evince didn't support those PDF flags, as simple and as trivial
it would be to bypass I'm pretty sure that it would be illegal under the
EUCD. And, I don't know of any examples of software on my system which
does ignore DRMs (well... maybe: perhaps Firefox ignoring javascript to
disable right-clicks, etc. counts?) and effectively bypasses them.

So, I don't see that on the face of it, the French proposal makes much
difference, unless what they're somehow trying to do is prevent people
from distributing the source to (say) evince, because a hacker could get
in there and remove all the code that respects those silly PDF flags? If
that is an example of how the French proposal is different to EUCD as
you suggest it might be, I would say that would be *extremely* serious
for free software.

Perhaps an apt analogy would be to outlaw handyman joiners, because
burglars can use crowbars too.

Cheers,

Alex.