The Free Software pact for the European elections!

In case you did not notice, the Free Software Pact is now available in even more languages.

As explained in our press release, FSFE officially supports the Free Software Pact drafted by April. The aim is to get candidates to this year’s European Parliament elections to take a stand for free software by signing this little text.

Thus, it’s important to get translations so that you can contact your local politicians and inform them about free software and why it’s important!

A lot of the translating efforts have happened on our mailing list, so go subscribe there if you want to help proofread ongoing translations before uploading them on the wiki.

The elections are coming near!

ACTA : « une forme douce de terrorisme » / “A kind of soft terrorism”

Nous sommes censés représenter les citoyens, mais comme ils sont occupés à autre chose, nous sommes censés réfléchir à leur place !

We are supposed to represent citizens, however since they are busy with other things, we are supposed to think for them!

— Marielle Gallo, députée du parlement européen favorable à ACTA, à propos du vote des commissions du parlement européen contre le texte.
pro-ACTA MEP, about the vote against the treaty from the European Parliament commissions

(source pcINpact)

ACTA: this is the kind of nonsense we’re dealing with.

The ACTA has thrown a lot of nonsense at us, citizens, for the last four years now. Not only the policies the agreement wants to impose are absurd from economic, social and cultural standpoints (if you’re aiming at any kind of progress or well-being); but also the whole process that we’ve been trying to deal with is made of such non-sense that it’s hard to make the citizens’ voice heard (and even less to make the citizen’s voice count — you know: free speech and democracy).

Lately, the European Parliament legal service has refused to provide a public analysis on ACTA, although it was aksed to do so by the European Parliament (people we elected to represent us at the EU level). The reason?

“Important trading partners of the EU, such as the United States, Canada, Japan, Korea and Switzerland are contracting parties to the ACTA agreement. Disclosure of the parts of the legal opinion under consideration dealing with questions 1, 2 and 3 would seriously interfere with the complex ratification procedures of the ACTA agreement and the EU’s relations with the other contracting parties, as it might prejudice the ratification procedures by these countries.”

(source, the excellent Ante on FFII ACTA’s blog)

So, let’s sum up.

The legal service won’t publish their analysis because it might influence the ratification process of other parties to the agreement; that means other than the EU.

So the EU Parliament will vote on ratification on a treaty without public analysis, because such an analysis would have influenced the US. Brilliant, if not sad.

For a quick analysis on how ACTA endangers Free Software growth, please read ACTA: threats to Free Software. Your comments on that are strongly welcome.