French parliament just approved today DADVSI, the worst copyright law in Europe.

For those who don't know about DADVSI, this law is the French version of DMCA, supposedly created to fight against "piracy" and P2P, ended up in enforcing copyright in the worst way, making illegal previously licit uses of copyright material, like private copy or making de-facto illegal things like reading a DVD with free software. Parts of the DADVSI, like the so-called Vivendi Universal amendment explicitly makes programs than are "obviously" made to share illegally copyrighted material (sic, lawyers will have fun determining if a webserver is "obviously" a copyrighted material sharing program). Making available such programs will be of course illegal and debians mirrors will risk three years of jail ... will Debian continue shipping amule on its French mirrors?

As a conclusion for this months long fight that proved majority does not care neither about democratic procedures nor the 170.000 citizens that signed the EUCD.INFO petition, we still has a chance constitutional council declares DADVSI as anti-constitutional.

Scary, heh? /Debian bdrieu@april.org Fri Jun 30 2006 23:00