Meanwhile, in France…
December 27th, 2005
Note: extensively updated since yesterday’s original post
The opening lines state: “… la gratuité est un mythe, destructeur de la création la plus audacieuse et la plus innovante.” (… “free distribution is a myth, the destroyer of the most innovative and daring creation.”). This is from a proposed law called DADVSI, or “Droits d’auteurs et droits voisins dans la société de l’information” (the Rights of Authors and Related Rights in the Information Society).
Firefox, Google, and others need to be informed immediately that the French Ministry of Culture has determined that their business models are failures! France, just beginning to recover from the legacy of the Minitel, is working hard to come up with new rules to regulate user behavior!
DADVSI is the French version of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, but even worse. It aims to get rid of free file sharing and other evil by-products of consumer choice by (among other things) charging a fee (tax) to users for peer-to-peer sharing, and enforcing it by setting up a numbering system to keep track of all copies of digitized “works.” The open-source software community has even been told that “we will forbid you to publish your source code.”
Over at the International Herald Tribune, fresh from a brainwashing debriefing by French legislators, Thomas Crampton thinks DADVSI is great because it would legalize file sharing. Which it would, in the same way that stupid patents legalize use of internationalized domain names, or one-click shopping carts, or video streaming — that is to say, legalize it in the most restrictive way possible.
Crampton is about 180 degrees off from the truth when he says, “Needless to say, the music and movie industry people were not terribly pleased.” Huh? Vivendi-Universal thinks it’s a great idea, and LCI, one of the major independent (i.e., no obvious axe to grind) online news sources, has this to say (translation mine):
… the text has been adapted in manner to please the powerful cultural industries, more precisely the music industry, which wants to impose the most control possible over music works…. But the proposed law goes further: a number of organizations have called attention to an amendment which would make it a counterfeiting crime to develop or distribute a computer which would permit file sharing without “technical measures to preserve works or other protected objects against non-authorized usage.” In other words, every computer that would allow unauthorized file sharing.
According to eucd.info, French “internautes” are protesting en masse (137512 individuals and 700 organizations, you can see the real-time count here) against DADVSI.
Le Monde Informatique (one of Le Monde’s blogs) has some choice words for this proposed law (free-ish translation mine):
DADVSI: The art of manipulation: DADVSI continues to provide the occasion for astonishingly surreal proposals. The latest documentation provided by the Ministry of Culture is a monument of the genre. Is this due to the incompetence of their technical adviser, Marc Hérubel (whom I have not been able to get a hold of despite my harrassment of his secretary), or a deliberate lie with the purpose of manipulating the press and the Parliament?
(For those of you with French language skills and a stomach for such things, you can read the entire text of the law.)
EUCD.info has been spearheading the protest. You can even send a letter in English protesting the DADVSI to Jacques Chirac, President of France.
New Blogs of Interest from France (in French)
While not quite a counterweight to official French dumbheadededness, a couple of new interesting blogs have shown up (in French). Olivier Ricou is publishing a new blog about domain names and Internet governance, and Cedric Manara is writing a blog about the legal aspects of domain names.
The French, in general, hate rules but somehow can’t live without an abundance of them!
It’s a huge paradox and again, in this thread, it shows… badly.
Perhaps it would be important to note the “public administration” in France observes complex ranking structures which grant ridiculously vast powers to “older” administrators, namely the Minister in charge of Culture.
The younger people there would probably laugh at his comments which, in every way, sound like an echo from the ice age.
And to be quite blunt, France is handling the Internet the wrong way. Business should rule the online world, not culture.
By definition, culture can only strive if there exists a stream of business, in one way or another.
By adding weight to the “French” web, the rest of the world, namely China, India and the rest of the Western World will zoom past the poor French managers who will have to obey a capricious regulatory system.
The French are fantastic people but every once in a while, another law is proposed to annoy everyone living happily until then ; )
Claude Gelinas | December 31st, 2005 at 3:40 am