DADVSI and digital oppression
Just to take note of it, as there is an extensive article on the very issue to be found at eucd.info, an initiative started by Free Software Foundation France in order to raise awareness of what’s goin’ on in the legislation process around the so-called DADVSI bill. This one, right now, has been passed the French parliament, leaving France with the worst copyright to be found in Europe (even though probably not as bad as DMCA).
Basically, there have been quite some attempts in order to make DADVSI balanced, also respecting needs and demands of customers and users. In the end, most of these changes have been discarded, and not even the demand of interoperability is in place anymore (at least, not in a way usable or meaningful to users). There also is an article explaining what DADVSI in its current state does mean to the public. In the end, it’s all the same once again: Blindly destroy creativity, damage chances provided by technology and communication in order to support some fuzzy “rights” of “content owners” (in other words: the global media industry massively pushing ahead laws like DADVSI). By now, probably all that can be done is raising awareness of that very issue, making people more sensitive about the drawbacks and flaws that come with DRM and its legal enforcement.
So, meanwhile, supporting Defective-By-Design is a good thing. Actually, right now there is an attempt underway to win U2 vocalist Bono, being well-known both for being a musician and a political activist, as a prominent supporter of the campaign in order to reach a wider public (signing this petition is almost mandatory, I’d say…). And, besides that, there’s a web site of the Canadian Music Creators Coalition, which is really interesting for one reason: Right now, most of the lobbyists demanding “more protection of intellectual property” actually pretend to represent the interests of creators of content worldwide. On this page, you can read opinions of musicians that actually do create works of art and don’t really share what music industry massively would like to see put in law:
Legislative proposals that would facilitate lawsuits against our fans or increase the labels’ control over the enjoyment of music are made not in our names, but on behalf of the labels’ foreign parent companies.
So, let’s support musicians instead of the music industry. 🙂