To everyone’s surprise, the French national assembly just voted an amendment (FR) defended by the Greens, dealing with the issue of DRM in ebooks. If the law is also voted by the Senat (and once the two assemblies agreed on a common version) French legislation will acknowledge that a book with DRM or in a closed format is no book but a digital service. It will therefore not benefit from a reduced VAT anymore (19.6% instead of 5.5%).

During the debate (FR), French MEPs specified that a book is something that can be borrowed, read as many times as its owners wishes, taken anywhere.. Restricted “books” don’t qualify, obviously.

Hoping that it will become law and that France will inspire other European countries (for once..)! In any case, exposing DRM is already weakening them. We are working on it everyday lately: check theydontwantyou.to!

EDIT: Most people expected the amendment to be removed from the draft law sooner or later. It was done just one day after the first vote. French government made the national assembly vote an other amendment to remove the previous one, and socialist MPs voted it. 

The government argues that making a difference between DRM’d eBooks and free ones would weaken France in it’s negociation with the European Commission about cultural exception (the idea that art and culture are not a commercial good like any other, and that they should therefore not be part of any free trade agreement).

The draft law (Finance Act) is far from being in its final version. The original DRM amendment could be re-introduced by the second assembly, the Senat. Resistance is growing. On their website and social media, both April and Framasoft are calling people to contact their representatives in the Senat and convince them to table and vote the amendment.  Will do.

The commission about which I was writing Wednesday confirmed the Free Software amendment and corrected its wording.

It now states

“Art. L. 123-4-1. – The Public Service for Higher Education provides digital services and educational resources to its users.”
“free software is used as a priority.”

The compromise version, on which members of the Senat and of the National Assembly agreed, still has to be voted by both assemblies in plenary session.

A similar provision on a bill dealing with primary and secondary education was strongly watered down by the French government two weeks-ago, probably because of ignorance. Let’s hope that the government has learned from its mistakes in the meantime.

• Writing to / calling your representatives isn’t very hard

If I had known this I would have started doing it earlier.

– No need to be a genius or an expert on the topic. Telling them why you feel concerned seems very efficient!

– You probably will not talk to the actual elected person but with his/her assistant(s). They are often young and the ones I talked to were always very friendly and helpful.

– Telling your own story helps! On Wednesday I talked about my cartography courses at university, on proprietary software costing a few hundred euro per licence. Of course I was never able to use the knowledge acquired during the course anywhere else.. Universities have to choose. Do they want to

• teach how to use a proprietary software that one student per class *may* use professionally;

•  or give free and Free tools and knowledge to all students, who will then use is for any project/course/research/job for which could need it?

This – and many other things, is what I told the MPs and Senators. It’s not hard, anyone can do it! We could organise “Call your MPs” workshops: the first call is the hardest one.

Two weeks ago I was writing about the French Government watering down a pro- Free Software amendment. This week brought some interesting news about France again:

• Fleur Pellerin, a Free Software enthusiast?

At Mozilla’s official Paris headquarters’ opening, our Minister in charge of digital economy gave a nice speech (FR) celebrating Free Software.

Those [Mozilla and Free Software’s] values are access to knowledge for all, trust and amplification of the Internet’s general interest aspect. It is also social values: forwarding a virtuous, open, participatory model of society, where data is above all considered as a good accessible to the greatest possible number of people and a source of knowledge that anyone can use, improve and share.

She talked about how great Free Software is for innovation and economy, and stressed the work of the current government on the issue – especially with their 2012 memorandum (EN) about the use of Free Software in French public administration.

French Government and digital freedom, one step forward two steps backward (or the contrary…)?

• What is MIMO …?

This week again, we discovered a blog post by the Document Foundation welcoming “MIMO” in its Advisory Board. MIMO seems to be an interdepartmental working group composed of representatives of 9 French ministries, working on “open office software” (bureautique ouverte).

Here is the only official page I could find about MIMO. Lovely design!

I don’t really get the idea. They made a CD to install (a special?) version 3.5  of Libre Office for Windows. They should also offer other Free Software for the administration, but I could not find much on their list.

According to the Document Foundation, MIMO is testing and approving one version of LibreOffice per year. They ensure that it is compatible with the IT infrastructure and processes of member ministries. They are said to have several working groups (cloud computing, the organisation and planning of IT systems, Open Source…) but have no official website. Intriguing..

• A provision on unitary patent hidden in a draft law on Advanced Education and Research

Talking about intriguing things, April highlighted (FR) two interesting amendments to the draft law on Advanced Education and Research that will be discussed this week by the French Sénat in plenary session.

They would allow the ratification of the European agreement on unified patent jurisdiction. As the law is examined under an emergency procedure, it will only be discussed once in the Sénat. Nice way to put a highly controversial issue to vote.

The agreement on unitary patent gives a lot of power to the European Patent Office (EPO). And even if they are not supposed to exist in Europe, EPO has been granting software patent for years, calling them patent on “computer implemented inventions”.

Let’s see if it generates any debate in the French Sénat..

• Priority to Free Software in education: second reading in the Sénat

The weak new version of the law will be discussed again on Monday 24, next week.

Busy time!