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You wonder why, here's an explanation : RMS is a genius, but our "beloved" prime minister clearly is not.

Maybe he didn't want to look stupid when asked some questions about DRM...

Here's a link to the home of white flag linux...

lynx --head --dump http://www.premier-ministre.gouv.fr/en/
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.10
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate
Expires: Fri, 02 Dec 2005 22:31:34 GMT
Date: Fri, 02 Dec 2005 22:31:34 GMT
Connection: close

Way to declare war on France! Next target for slashdotting: The Prime Minister's website

Please stay polite, and don't spam it, it will be much more effective that way.

Madame la minstre Tasca can be joined via http://www.culture.fr/culture/comment-ministre.htm

Le premier ministre Jospin can be reached at mailto:premier-ministre@premier-ministre.gouv.fr . As there are 3 elections in the next 18 month, telling him the opinion you have on the issue and how it will impact you vote can be pretty effective.

Resistance (which is not futile) is at www.vachealait.com

If you know other resources, please reply. I don't want SONY/EMI/VIVENDI etc, getting money each time I burn a FreeBSD CD

Thanks.

Cheers,

--fred

Quand j'entend le mot "culture" je sort mon portefeuille.

I read the press trying to get a few hard facts on the said court ruling. All I got is from imprecise sources such as newspapers, so take it with a grain of salt.

• The ruling is a summary injunction (référé), which means that it has been issued by a single judge.
• The matter has not yet been appealed to a court of appeal. We should probably wait until such things get appealed to the supreme court (cour de cassation) before we conclude that French jurisprudence has been defined with respect to sites abroad selling forbidden material. Unfortunately, with the current overload of the supreme court, it should take several years.
• As with the Georgia Tech case, the lawsuit was not brought by the government but by private nonprofit associations, LICRA (International League against Racism and Antisemitism) and UEJF (Union of Jewish Students of France). Therefore it is wrong to conclude anything from this case about the position of either the president, the cabinet, the national assembly or the senate. They apparently ask for reparations in accordance with article 48.2 of the (revised) law on the Press of 1981 which allows a nonprofit association whose statutory goals include fighting racism to ask for reparations even though the association is no direct victim.
• Apparently, the motive of the lawsuit is article 24 of the same law, which prohibits inciting discrimination, hatred or violence against a person or a group of persons because of their origin or their belonging or non-belonging to an ethnic group, a nation or a determined religion (punishable by one year of prison and/or a 300,000 FRF fine, not precluding the civil damages). Means of such incitation to hatred include drawings or emblems (article 23).

• Whether or not a nazi emblem promotes racial hatred;
• Whether or not a French court can order an US company to comply to its rulings (apparently, the matter will have to be brought before an US court); of course, Yahoo France must comply.

Furthermore, as far as I know, are exempt from the ban prints of such items for education or scholarly research. I do not know where this comes from legally. Surely indeed, some public libraries, including the National Library of France have printouts of Mein Kampf available for readers!

I therefore think the Slashdot community should wait and see further progress in the case; jumping to conclusions is clearly overreacting.

General background of the law

It seems that very few in the US are aware of the commitment of the French government to catch up with the development of the Internet. As some pointed out in this forum, France has been in advance for some technology developments. For example we have been using Smartcards for years, and the Minitel has provided to French people, secure online services and information since 1986. Unfortunately the Minitel was a dead-end and this technology could not be scaled and evolve, and it development may account for some of the delay in the development of Internet in France.

Since 1997 the French government has launched a big program to promote the development of Internet. There is an internet site (in French, English, German and Spanish) which gathers all the information on the development of Internet led by the French government: http://www.internet.gouv.fr/engli sh/sommaire.html (in English). The initiation of this program was made in August 1997, by the Prime Minister during a speech which is translated at the following address: http://www.premier-ministre.g ouv.fr/GB/INFO/HOURT.HTM (in English). In January 1998, the Prime Minister announced a program ( http://www.internet. gouv.fr/english/textesref/dpresang.htm , in English) which main priorities are:

1. new information and communications technology tools in the education sector
2. an ambitious cultural policy for new networks,
3. information technology as a tool for modernizing public services,
4. information technology, an essential tool for companies,
5. meeting the challenges of industrial and technological innovation,
6. encouraging the emergence of effective regulation and a protective framework for new information networks.

Now, most of the extensive government information and services that were already available on the Minitel, are accessible from the Internet. "The Internet must become a standard tool for the government."

Points missing

The bill discussed at the French Senate is missing a very important point: the necessity to have open document standards for all the information and documentation publish by the national and local administrations. Beside promoting open source software, it should also promote structured document standards such as SGML or XML.

The second point which is missing is that the French government should not only promote the use of Open Software in the administration, but it should also promote the development of OSS. Development project should be funded by the government to develop software needed by the administration in an open source background.

Alain Ducasse