To the Movie and Music lobbies that is. Via BoingBoing (and Baen's Bar) comes a link to this site, which is extremely upset about how the French government is implementing the EUCD - the EU's equivalent of the US DMCA. If half of what it says is correct then this has to be one of the worst laws ever written by any French government for passage by its parliament. There are probably worse laws - I seem to recall there were some despicable laws about exemptions for the slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries and some of the Vichy era laws concerning Jews weren't good either - but the degree of special interest influence in the bill as described means that this proposed law, if passed and if enforced*, will make the law of unintended consequences work over time.
In its haste to surrender to Vivendi and other media companies, the French government seems to be about to kill half of the already miniscule number of high tech startups in France. The reason for this is that a whole load of French startups (Awox, OpenPlug, Peerio to name three off the top of my head) are developing products to do with open source and the (re)play of potentially copyright audio or video streams. I'm glad I only live here and don't work here much, but one client we have is going to be utterly screwed by this I think. Somehow I suspect that France's Home Entertainment industry (Thomson etc.) has not seen the problem for the products they intend to introduce over the next year or two. Either that or they intend to ignore their home market when it comes to new products.
Of course it will depend on precisely how the law is enforced but as I read it, services such as Skype will be illegal because Skape allows files to transfered from one computer to another securely as will secure email services such as POP-SSL and, for that matter, HTTPS downloading. In fact it would seem to me that this law will in fact mandate that all French ISPs implement draconian firewalls and proxies that will closely resemble those of states such as Saudi Arabia or the People's Republic of China in order to ensure that no copyright files are transfered.
You will see above an icon suggesting that you sign the petition, go do it. Especially if you are one of my France-based readers.
For my UK and other Euro area readers consider that this piece of crap is the French implementation of an EU directive and do make sure that your nation isn't about to implement something just as flawed with the same limited public debate.
I despise l'Escroc and Vile
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