[Fsfe-ie] "French Government Lobbied to Ban Free Software"
Jean-François Bucas
jfbucas at tuxfamily.org
Tue Jan 10 20:08:19 CET 2006
Hello,
Actually, the DADVSI project has been debated during the end of December
in the french parliement. This was really *intense* with the actual
government trying to force the law (partialy describe in the link) and a
lot of critics from everywhere. Not only the FSF, but lot of consumers
and artists associations were informing the citizens and I think the
original text was really disguting, protecting the interest of few
against all the others...
As a result, the law had a lot of "patches" (amendments [1] ), and, for
example, downloading movies and music is now allowed for personal use.
But to be honest, the watcher/listener has to pay a "global tax" with
the ISP bill (roughly 5 to 10 euros). This is really not perfect
because, the question remains : How distribute the money to artists ?
On the software side of the debate, the word the most said during all
the debates was "interoperability". The free software were for the first
time in french politic history, inside all the mouths. Lots of arguments
were in favor of indenpendance, accessibility and diversity.
In my opinion, there is two facts important for the french democracy :
First, the petition on http://eucd.info : 144 570 signatures in less
than one month !
Second, during the debates, the french parliement website had more
visits than ever, and the deputies felt like they were observed by everyone.
This is not finished yet, but hopefully, most of the french politicians
are fully aware of what technologies are bringing to modern societies.
Next step at the end of february !
Jef
[1] : http://wiki.framasoft.info/uploads/EUCD/classement-amendements.html
Malcolm Tyrrell wrote:
> I just came accross this. I don't know if this is old news by now, but
> it looks pretty disturbing:
>
> http://www.fsffrance.org/news/article2005-11-25.en.html
>
> Malx.
>
>
>
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