French Parliament approves the worst copyright law in Europe

Fri Jun 30 19:53:53 UTC 2006

French Parliament approves the worst copyright law in Europe

http://www.eucd.info/index.php?2006/06/30/333-french-parliament-approves-the-worst-copyright-law-in-europe

Paris, 30 june 2006,

The French Parliament has voted Friday, June 30th 2006 to approve the
DRM bill called DADVSI (Â« droit d'auteur et droits voisins dans la
sociÃ©tÃ© de l'information Â»). This bill was voted by raised hands instead
of the electronic voting system normally used for solemn votes of that
kind. This law is both unacceptable and unenforceable. The EUCD.INFO
<http://www.eucd.info> initiative publicly notes that the government has
gone to the furthest in denying democracy, by having the bill finally
voted on Friday, June 30, eve of the parliamentary recess. See Â« What
does the new French copyright bill do ? Â»
<http://eucd.info/index.php?2006/06/30/335-what-does-the-new-french-copyright-bill-do>
for a list of some of the known problems of DADVSI, including references
to the articles in the bill.

Many members of parliament opposed to the bill thus could not speak
against it, since the proxy voting system used at the National Assembly
did not allow them to.

The EUCD.INFO initiative deplores, however, that many members of
parliament from the majority, opposed to the bill, have preferred to
abstain from this final vote by not being present in Parliament, rather
than consciously rejecting a bill threatening the freedoms of the whole
citizenry. It also deplores that the opposition members of parliaments
have not attended this vote en masse.

The EUCD.info initiative now invites all members of parliament hoping to
prevent the worst to sign, beyond the partisan divides, the recourse
that the Parti Socialist will send before the Constitutional Council.

The French bill on author's rights and related rights in the information
society is a bill reforming French copyright law in order to implement
the 2001 European directive on copyright (known as EUCD), which is the
Europe's equivalent to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
This law drastically changes author's rights in France. DADVSI is the
worst copyright law in Europe.

Christophe Espern of EUCD.INFO says Â« This bill was subjected to
unreasonable lobbying pressure and menaces from the entertainment and
proprietary software industries. The goal of this law is to impose DRM
schemes in order to increase profits of few, but their profit is a side
issue when millions of people's freedom is at stake. The French
governement and the majority sold the freedom of French citizens to
Vivendi, Microsoft and Apple Â».

In December 2005, the EUCD.INFO initiative launched a petition
<http://eucd.info/petitions/index.php?petition=2> against DADVSI, that
requests that the legislative bill be removed from the agenda of the
French Parliament. It has been signed by more than 170,000 French
residents and by around 1,000 French organizations.

FrÃ©dÃ©ric Couchet of FSF France and APRIL says Â« We wish to thank all the
signatories and those people who have taken the time to contact their
deputies and senators. We lost this battle but the war is not over.
We've been able to raise the awareness on Free Software,
Interoperability and Open Standards in all social, cultural and economic
activities of today. The wonderful mobilzation that has occured during
this battle will, without any doubt, be very usefull in the follow-up of
the fightÂ».

EUCD.INFO is an initiative which was launched by FSF France
<http://www.fsffrance.org> (Free Software Foundation France) in December
2002 to fight the French bill on author's rights named DADVSI. EUCD.INFO
is backed by APRIL <http://www.april.org> (Association for Promotion and
Research in Libre Computing, founded in 1996) and many other organizations.

You can read more information about DADVSI on :

  * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DADVSI

  * http://eucd.info/index.php?English-readers

Some background :

In December 2005, the EUCD.INFO initiative launched a petition
<http://eucd.info/petitions/index.php?petition=2> against DADVSI, that
requests that the legislative bill be removed from the agenda of the
French Parliament. It has been signed by more than 170,000 French
residents and by around 1,000 French organizations.

The people behind EUCD.INFO have for months now been actively working to
convince the government and the members of parliament to amend the bill.
Some of the amendments they've proposed were voted into law by the
French Lower chamber (Â«AssemblÃ©e NationaleÂ») in March 2006.

The text contained some deplorable provisos, among which the so-called
"Vivendi-Universal" amendment, that implements fines and prison terms
for the publishing of software "obviously intended" to provide
copyrighted works to the public without authorization. But there were
also some very positive changes regarding DRM. For instance, the
guarantee that DRM not prevent interoperability, and the requirement
that the source code for independent software that operates in
conjunction with a DRM system be released. These aforementioned
amendments were negotiated with deputies from the right and left wings.
They were proposed by EUCD.INFO, which has been coordinating this bill's
advocacy campaign. Article 7 of the text was a very good for
interoperability and it is the only concession the government has made
so far. These amendments were mistakenly called "the iTunes bill" by the
Anglo-American press, even though they were adopted against the will of
the French government. Read more on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DADVSI#Interoperability_and_Apple_controversy

The legislative procedure continued and the text went to the 2nd chamber
where the French Senate did a major revision to the bill. Article 7 was
rewritten to omit the guarantee of interoperability. The Senate voted to
pass the bill in May 2005. Normally, the bill would be returned to the
Lower Chamber for a second reading, but the government has decided to
use a shortened "emergency procedure" : a committee of 7 politicians
from both chambers finalized the text on Thursday, June 22th 2006 in a
kind of conciliatory procedure. Most of the players who have been
affected by the bill have asked for a second reading in the Lower Chamber.

Finally, Senate and AssemblÃ©e Nationale voted the text on Friday, June
30th. The final text rescind the guarantee of interoperability to
introduce an administrative authority capable of adjudicating the
possibility of reading DRM contents in order to achieve interoperability.

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