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French PM Unreceptive To RMS
An anonymous reader writes "Six month after the publication of very bad amendments to French DRM law proposal, Richard Stallman has been pushed back by the chief of security team of French Prime minister.
On Friday 9th of June 2006 at 3.30pm, Richard Stallman, president of Free Software Foundation, led a delegation composed by Frédéric Couchet (Free Software Foundation France) and Christophe Espern (EUCD.INFO initiative) to meet the French Prime minister in order to talk about the French DRM law proposal and to deliver the EUCD.INFO petition signed by more than 165,000 French residents. Richard Stallman and his friends were pushed back by the chief of security team. "
You may not agree with Stallman's tactics, but the message this sends is clear: The people passing today's draconian intellectual property laws they are NOT representing the general public -- they are representing coporate interests.
Bill Gates is a citizen of the US, just like Stallman. Gates and Stallman take opposing viewpoints on the particular issue, and both are well known and intelligent individuals with strong arguments. However, only Gates was allowed to talk to the PM.
Stallman tried to get an audience with the PM, but was refused. It was only after the refusal that he tried to just "barge in", and there is *nothing wrong with this*. This kind of thing has happened throughout history -- a corrupt goverment has favored a certain group of people, and the unfavored group resorts to any tactics necessary to get themesleves heard.
Those of you who are criticizing Stallman, saying thing like "duh, I could have told you this would fail"... You're totally missing the point. Stallman also knew it would fail. Why else would he have a cameraman on hand ready to document the event. He's making a point, and it seems like a lot of people are missing it.
In a very real sense, Stallman represents the little guy, and Gates represents the corporate interests. In a very real sense, the goverments are NOT listening to the people. When the governments are only hearing one side of the story on DRM/copyright, it should be obvious that the laws are going to be heavily biased. And *this* is what is bad. Nobody from the opposite end of the spectrum is being listened to, and we are LOSING OUR RIGHTS.
Stallman is out there putting his ass on the line to show people this, and hopefully reach a larger audience than the few geeks on Slashdot who already know how bad everything has gotten. Before you get too critical of his methods, ask yourself what *you* have done to help turn the tide. Because sitting on your ass complaining about the shutdown of The Pirate Bay isn't accomplishing a damn thing.
I don't doubt that the prime minister has no intention of meeting with RMS, but in fairness their request to see the PM was two weeks before they showed up. It is quite possible, and in fact likely, that the PM of France might actually be so busy as to not be able to schedule a meeting within 2 weeks. We're talking about DRM here, not a pending German invasion. It can wait. I doubt there are many world leaders you could get a meeting with in less than two weeks.
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Well, one difference is that the PM is in charge of a democracy, whereas the two people in your analogy are economic competitors. One might reasonably be inclined to think that those in charge of a democracy have some duty to listen to their citizens, and one might also wonder just how accessible our ``leaders" are these days. (I live in Texas, and I'm way to the left. Do you think I'm going to get an audience with my insanely conservative senators to explain why they should support net neutrality or abortion rights or drug legalization or gay marriage? Yeah, ``make an appointment"---that's a great idea.)
Of course, RMS is not a citizen of France (though other members of the delegation are), and we can always debate the effectiveness of any particular political action/stunt. But the idea that he was just being rude because he was demanding attention from the elected leaders of a democracy is the kind of notion that ensures that the status quo (and whoever owns it) rules the day.
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken
There is a thing called protocol. Diplomatic protocol has many functions, one of them is to serve as a spam filter.
It sounds as if what they did was to send the letter to the French PM's office directly where it would be mixed in with all the letters from the other hundred thousand or so cranks writing to him. The chance that the letter would even be read by a minor functionary in that time is small. The chance of a prompt reply smaller.
Correct protocol in the case of RMS would have been to send the letter to the French Embassy in the US and request a meeting with the minister in charge of technology. Demanding a meeting with the PM is pretty presumptuous for a private individual who is not even a citizen of the country concerned.
I was really hoping that this was going to be a case where I could say that I had zero sympathy for either party. However it appears that only RMS was acting in a meglamonaical fashion in this particular case.
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