by Flemming Funch
Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing: France may soon enact the worst copyright law in Europe, sneaking it through in a legislative session scheduled for December 22 and 23.
Europe's equivalent to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a controversial directive called the EUCD. Each EU state is responsible for implementing the minimum set of EUCD restrictions (which are far from minimal!) but each state can exceed the minimum, and the entertainment lobby pushes hard to see to it that they do. They've run amok in France, subverting the lawmaking process with a farcical wish-list of penalties, mandates and software bans.
Copyfighters in France have published a detailed alert in French; what follows is a loose, machine-assisted translation (substantive corrections gladly sought):
* A prohibition on all software that permits transmission [disposition is unclear without greater context] of copyrighted material that does not integrate both a watermark and DRM
* A prohibition on marketing or advertising such software
* These prohibitions include legal sanctions
* DRM mandates for digital radio transmission
* A universal wiretapping system for private communication [This is defined elsewhere as a system to check for, say, music files attached to email messages, and not one that would violate the "secret of private correspondence".]
* Creation of a universal filtering system for all ISPs
Summary in French here, and there's a petition one can sign against it. Very disappointing to see the French government in the pocket of multi-national media companies.
Read a news article here. Note that the law being proposed would make the publishing of free software a criminal offense. The government threatens to sue anybody who openly publishes their source code.
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