[Wsis-pct] Happy New Year / New Copurigh Law in France

[Dr. Francis MUGUET]

Dear Defenders of Freedom

First *Happy New Year to all of you*,
a Year that would hopefully witnesses
advances for Freedom.

Sorry for my belated wishes.
I have been extremely busy,
  since the end of the WSIS until
the end of November and
in December I had to endure
several disk crashes, one at home and a more
vicious one on one of my servers that kept being
in a limbo state while destroying many files,
even on another "backup" disk that was seemingly sane,
while allowing junk updates by rsync on remote backups.
I still manage to salvage quite a few sites, but
I lost quite a few MySQL databases.
Of interest to the few of you registered
in a mailing at @wtis.org
All the lists are this domain are lost
and not functionnal.

You will have to wait until I get time
to update the page on the site concerning
TUNIS. Sorry. There are some positive implications
concerning the alternative financing mechanism
( first proposed on this list on April 29, 2005 )
that we shall have to discuss later (no emergency).

However, in France, as I posted ( 23 Dec ) on
  the plenary list there has been a stunning,
and rather unexpected ( and very happy ) turn
of event during the parliamentary debate of
the law concerning the application in France
of the European directive concerning
Copyrights.
This law title can be roughtly translated as
"Copyrights and related rights
  of the Information Society"
DADVSI ( french acronym )

I could not spend as much as I wished concerning
advocacy concerning the DADVSI law in general
because of the disk crashes et because I had
a dozen of student waiting for me to write
the specs of the next version of the
P2Ptelevision.net project.

Please find pages that I just finalized on the
PCT site :
http://www.wsis-pct.org/pct-dadvsi.html

As I wrote :
It must be underlined that are many more issues that at stake in the law 
than just P2P, that may as important, if not more important, than P2P, 
like free interoperability. I did not have to focus on other topics, and 
I would be glad to put links to any site that would contain detailled 
informations and discussions concerning other aspects of the DADVSI.
I an not saying that amendments 153 & 154 are perfect
either.

However, the thing that is a breakthrough at the polical level ( which
very seldom happens in France ), is it was a coalition of deputies
from the right ( in disobediance with the current government ) and the 
left.   We have even a catholic traditionalist woman voting for this
amendment !.   So I guess we are witnessing something new.
The governement is planning to resume the examination of the law
on January 18 and get the amendment removed.
( I just got the news, that the law will be sent to
a parliamentary commission and sent back to the parliament on Frebruary 
7, but still the emergency and danger remains ).

Therefore, some friends and me are planning in an emergency
to bring this topic on the spotlight at one of the few
( if not the only one remainign )  Civil Society
meeting that is also widely attended by
influential civil servants,  politicians
http://www.autrans.net
( co-organized by the way by Bruno Oudet, whom
some of you have met, as he was the civil society
adviser in the French delegation )
so that most deputies may vote
in an enlightnned way.
This is an uphill battle...
where any advocacy event could count.

More news tomorrow.

Best regards

Francis


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Francis F. MUGUET Ph.D

MDPI Foundation Open Access Journals
Associate Publisher
http://www.mdpi.org   http://www.mdpi.net
muguet at mdpi.org       muguet at mdpi.net

ENSTA   Paris, France
KNIS lab.  Director
"Knowledge Networks & Information Society" (KNIS)
muguet at ensta.fr   http://www.ensta.fr/~muguet

World Summit On the Information Society (WSIS)
Civil Society Working Groups
Scientific Information :  http://www.wsis-si.org  chair
Patents & Copyrights   :  http://www.wsis-pct.org co-chair
Financing Mechanismns  :  http://www.wsis-finance.org web

UNMSP project : http://www.unmsp.org
WTIS initiative: http://www.wtis.org
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