Last week, I blogged about a sneak attack on personal liberty in France: the entertainment companies have managed to stack France's new copyright law with innumerable, terrible clauses (no Free/Open Source software that can be used to share copyrighted works; all such software to have mandatory DRM, ISPs to mandatorily filter all traffic) and to cook the process so that the hearing on these clauses will take place on Dec 22 and 23, when public attention will be fixed on the coming holiday.
Now the French activists at EUCD.info have produced a page of English-language materials to help Anglos get up to speed on these issues. This will be the worst copyright law in Europe if it passes, a model for how to crush innovation, privacy, due process and the public interest in order to support the hysterical terrors of American entertainment dinosaurs.
Creating your own compilations from a CD, extracting your favourite piece of music to listen to it on your computer, transfering it on a MP3 player, lending a CD to a friend, reading a DVD with free software or duplicating it to be able to enjoy it at home and in your country house : many common practices, perfectly legal, which the French government plans to forbid in fact. The copyright and neighbouring rights in the information society bill (DADVSI) (n°1206) which the French government will try to force through in the coming weeks by using an emergency procedure, actually legitimates the technical devices installed by CD and DVD editors and producers to control their use. And above all, the bill plans criminal penalty against people who would dare to remove those.
(Thanks, Paula!)
