Slashdot Mirror
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. "
Then the problem may be that he was denied an appointment in the first place don't you think ?
For they are not just "someone" but 3 individuals quite involved into this DRM saga, thus having points and a petition to be discussed.
Bill Gates is received with all the honors by the President and RMS & Co can't even reach the prime minister or even some random official guy ?
Actually many associations (APRIL, FSF France, EUCD.INFO) wrote many letters to ask for an interview between the prime minister and RMS. Actually none of them was answered.
Letters were sent a few days ago to tell the day and hour of his coming (he flew from Boston especially for this occasion), so he wasn't exactly "forcing his way" and the guards said that de decision to refuse him was "maturely decided"... This is a political decision of not receiving him, and nothing else.
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.
Wow. RMS is nearly as important as Lyndon LaRouche.
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.
Finding other idiots on
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
Yes, a certain element in America likes to have an opinion on France. But in a sense, this is good. It is easy to identify complete morons this way.
In point of fact, what Americans who have issues with France don't understand about themselves is they hate France not because they "surrender," but because in their contrarian nature as per American-directed foreign policy, France asserts itself in precisely the same way as the French would if the situation were reversed.
In the same way the French government doesn't just roll over every time the US government wants to play GI Joe somewhere in the world, the US does the same when it comes to the UN. If the situation were reversed and France was the so-called "superpower," the US government would act just as France does. This reality is so uncomfortable to modern Americans, that it is psychologically blocked out. One would think given the purported values system of the US that we would respect people who had enough stones to say, "No" when the US demanded something. Instead on one hand Americans criticize the French for standing up for themselves and their own interests, but praise certain other countries for rolling over like bitches whenever the US wants to go launch some dumb war.
There are those of us here in the US who experience distinct amusement when France opts out of some harebrained US scheme, and Americans get all wound up. The "freedom fries" incident is just further proof of the devolution of a distinct segment of American society; a decent into dumb simian weirdness; I'm looking for atavistic traits to start to appear so we can identify these people on sight.
You know, as an American I get sick of having to listen to how horrible we are every ten seconds on the net, and I get sick of getting lumped in with a certain ugly element now dominant in our culture. I can understand how French people get sick of hearing this "surrender" shit every five minutes (and I'm sure modern Germans get tired of watching people try to wind them up about a certain period in their past).
Making blanket nationalistic statements against a whole people may be satisfying for a moment, but it can also be dispiriting to those of us in these countries who on one hand acknowledge the excesses of our own governments and cultures, and are kind of stuck with the situation, and get lumped in with the loudest and most obnoxious of our fellow citizens.
And while I acknowledge this growing cloud of Dumb hanging over the United States, I also refuse to accept that that cloud of Dumb exclusively defines us as a people. I refuse to look at the most ugly and obnoxious people in our country, who have in recent years been ascendant and have controlled the debate, and allow others to point to them and say, "That, there, is what the United States is." Because I am here too, as are many people who are disgusted. Our time will come, too.
Believe me, as much as it may annoy you to read tired, worn, cliche, unoriginal, trite comments about France, keep in mind that there are many reasonably intelligent people who have to live here next door to the people who make these idiotic comments on a daily basis. Their aggressive stupidity is not limited to the France-bashing. The France bashing is a symptom of a deeper problem, and these people vote.
I'd apologize for the freedom fries crap except, the people who did that don't represent me. They may claim to and people may recognize them as such but they are, to me, a distinctly alien crowd of people who have nothing to do with me, my interests, or my personal ideas of what the United States is supposed to be about (not that I even grant that the common criticisms of the US are all entirely valid, though many of them are).
Besides, we all know the reality about war - Americans have for several decades now truly enjoyed war...so long as it happens far away and doesn't impact them. I guarantee that as soon as war *inconveniences* the average American by, say, oh, happening on US soil, we'll
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.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/