France: Serious case of Mad Copyright Disease
In France, big business (read: Vivendi) and politics have gotten into bed together once again, and the result of the affair is as awful a child as can be: A bill on copyright and related rights in the information society, which comes directly from the legal labs of Vivendi-Universal and the Business Software Alliance.
The plan is to push the bill through in an emergency procedure right before Christmas, as an activist website reports.
They write what the French will have foisted upon them by one of their “national champions”:
An amendment to the proposed DADVSI bill has the aim of making criminal counterfeiting out of publication, distribution and promotion of all software susceptible to being used to open up data protected by author’s right and not integrating a method of controlling and tracking private usage (technical measure). All software permitting downloads is concerned, such as certain instant messaging software (chat) and all server software (P2P, HTTP, FTP, SSH).
While this has been flying under everyone’s radar for a while, now it’s going big. There’s a post on BoingBoing, and the technorati list of trackbacks to it. For German readers, heise.de has an excellent article as well.
It seems that the only way to stop this bill is for parliament to remove its “urgent” tag, so that it can be discussed reasonably. Apparently, this is what the law’s backers would like to avoid.
I will not start to enumerate the consequences and defects of this bill now, as there would be no end to the job. Just this: If someone seriously proposes a law decrying the HTTP protocol as a tool for copyright infringement, they suffer from so serious lack of understanding as to be pathological. Remember, the same company – Vivendi-Universal – is behind the IPRED2 directive.