Update on DADVSI…
… or: More strength to laws supressing the public: According to a new article posted by French legal expert and Audionautes representative Jean-Baptiste Soufron, French Constitutional Court has come to a decision on the heavily discussed DADVSI bill made to enforce the use of DRM technology in France and, in the digital age, establish a regime of music and content industry. This decision obviously is worse than DADVSI itself:
The Court suppresses the exception that protected software developers who were specifically working on collaborative software, research or file sharing. Given the decision, any French developers working on such softwares could be sued by DRM producers or copyright holders. Even when it software is intended for non-copyrighted contents.
In other words: Creating filesharing and P2P software already might be a violation of given law since this software might be used to circumvent DRM and, this way, be used to illegally distribute “copyrighted content”. So, no matter whether we use P2P software for some distributed business model or just to share Creative Commons-music, we’re already illegal. I’m waiting for the day someone declares owning a knife a serious crime (because actually you might use a knife to kill people). But it even gets worse:
On top of that, the Constitutional Court decided that it was normal to suppress the French version of Fair Use. Without regards for the importance of cultural exchange amongst individuals, it even precised that it was normal for DRM producers obstacle à toute copie, which means “to forbid any copy”. Nothing less.
Now that’s an interesting view on politics in an age of “democracy”: An institution elected by a majority of people willingly passes a law to enforce the interests of a few against worries and interests of this majority, and this is even considered “normal”. We don’t need to get to this point in order to see what needs to happen: People actually need to reclaim politics, to demand democracy again. The very moment we allow companies like Vivendi to push laws like this, we’re almost lost. We need some democracy again.