[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.
> 
> 
> 		
> ___________________________________________________________ 
> NEW Yahoo! Cars - sell your car and browse thousands of new and used cars online! http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/
> _______________________________________________
> fsfe-ie at fsfeurope.org mailing list
> List information: http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/fsfe-ie
> Public archive: https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-ie
> 



More information about the FSFE-IE mailing list