Slashdot Mirror
France Hostile To Open Source Software?
AdamWeeden writes "According to the Free Software Foundation of France the French Department of Culture is telling free (as in speech) software providers that 'You will be required to change your licenses ... You shall stop publishing free software,' and warn they are ready 'to sue free software authors who will keep on publishing source code.'" From the post: "It appears that publishing Free Software giving access to culture is about to become a counterfeiting criminal offence. Will SACEM sue France Télécom R&D research labs for having published Maay and Solipsis (P2P pieces of software used to exchange data)? Up to this point, the rather technical debate surrounding the issues addressed by DADVSI bill (copyright and neighbouring rights in the information society) makes one ask: Just how much control do the Big Players in the field of culture want to seize? It now looks like years of quibbling have put an end to compromises." More information on the DADVSI bill is available at Infos-du-net.com. They've come a long way since last year.
But....it is the government. Right now SNEP and SCPP don't have any legal legs to stand on. But, if the DADVSI bill gets passed, then the SNEP and SCPP will be able to sue. So, yes, the government is considering passing a bill which would allow these organizations to sue the free software authors.
I didn't think it was possible, but seeing all these replies makes me kind of ashamed of being part of the Slashdot community. I mean, occasional trolls are one thing, but more than hundred posts of fresh new jokes and insightful rants about France, that's just really embarassing. Signal to noise was never this bad. And the only on-topic comments by people who bothered to read the article came down to this being sort of a non-issue.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
So, yes, the government is considering passing a bill which would allow these organizations to sue the free software authors.
Agreed, but saying "the goverment is examining a bill proposed by the french MPAA" is very different from saying "French Department of Culture is telling free (as in speech) software providers that 'You will be required to change your license".
Especially when you quote an article that says "SNEP and SCPP have told Free Software authors:", you can't quote an FSF article and replace "MPAA" by "the Goverment" in an article posted on Slashdot's main page, its fucking crazy!
That's the image of the media these days, but I expected something better from slashdot.
From what little I understood...
.WMV file, if it doesn't, it would be illegal to use it.
Imagine you use Firefox to download a DRM'ed Windows Media Video file.
Firefox would have to respect the copy prohibition embedded in that
Now imagine Firefox DOES respect the copy prohibition. Since Firefox is Free Software, it can be modified so it WON'T respect the prohibition.
As such, it would be illegal to use it.
These two situations are an example of what that law would turn illegal.
If you dig to a lower level, maybe the network card driver should analise the content, I think.