pichel’s blog

Finally it’s somewhat reassuring to see that some institutions are still defending the essential principles of democracy, as they were thought 200 years ago. The Constitutional Council (approximative traduction) has finally decided that two dispositions of the voted law were disagreeing too strong with some principles. And it is interesting to understand which of them.

First of all : freedom of speech. And they haven’t gone into the constitution to defend that, but relied on the 1789’s Humans Right Declaration ! It’s 11th article states (approximately) :

Free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious human rights : every citizen has so the right to talk, write, print freely, apart from having to respond to abuse of this freedom to the extent determined by law.

The council estimated that nowadays, the freedom of talking, wrinting and printing was to be declined and extended to the freedom of publishing stuff on the Internet, and that deprivating Internet access to someone was in consequence a privation of freedom. As a consequence, such a sentence can only be pronouced by a judge and not a simple administrative commission.

Secondly, the text introduced the obligation for the acused person (which is only the owner of the Internet access) to produce the proof of his innocence. This clearly violates the principle that every person accusated of anything is to be considered as non-guilty untill the end of the judgment.

Nowadays, every politician, every buisinessman, want things to go fast, even in juridic matters, and they’re trying to automate all this. The Constitutional Council opportunately reminds them of the principles of democracy. Privating thousands of people from certain liberties in an automated way, IS NOT a democratic way of getting things done, in any manner. Dot.

Yesterday was a funny bad day. It was still funny because nobody in the coucil had Internet connection, just as if they were already applying Hadopi at it’s first day of legal existence… At least that what I answered to everybody that was inquiring me about their Internet connection 🙂

Despite of that, it was still bad, because we lost a great part of the Internet, a part that shouldn’t be lost : it’s neutrality. Covered by the duty to save big industries, the law will enforce packet filtering at the ISP level, and once the tools will be on, who will be able to point out that ISP A transports his content faster than the one from IPB B ? And that the government won’t later come in and ask them to search for any ‘terrosrist’ keywords ?

There is still hope at the european level that this law will be censored. But we have to carefully elect deputees on behalf of their awareness about Free Software. A useful tool in France is provided by candidate.fr who sent a declaration to be signed at every candidate : http://www.candidats.fr/europarl2009/ or in english if you prefer : http://www.candidats.fr/europarl2009/. Indeed, the very low amount of signature at this time leaves few doubt about the general awareness of those people on Free Software 🙁

I wonder if there are such initiative in other european countries… of course, but where ?

Finally and how surprising, the HADOPI law project was rejected yesterday by the french assembly !

Of course there weren’t many deputees present at the moment of the vote (21 against and 15 for which gives 36 people present out of 577… no comment), but this shows that all the buzz and reactions against this law project may finally have had some influence on the deputees.

The story is not over since the project will be presented again at the next session on the 28th of April.

If you want to learn more about the subject, and even if you only speak english, you will find this page useful : La Quadrature du Net.